Alex Padilla U.S. Senator for California

By Jesús Rodríguez and Sabrina Rodriguez

Last week, a Democratic senator walked into a news conference with questions. He left in handcuffs.

“Is this really happening?” Alex Padilla thought to himself.

This week, he’s thinking about what happened.

“Never did I imagine hands on me, and let alone being put on the ground,” Padilla, California’s first Latino senator, said in an interview at an office inside the Capitol this week.

It happened in his native Los Angeles, a city that had been engulfed in protests since federal agents arrived to crack down on undocumented immigrants. In response to the unrest, which has been largely peaceful but at times turned violent, President Donald Trump had ordered thousands of military personnel deployed to the city.

Padilla says he was at the Wilshire Federal Building waiting to start a briefing with top military officials when he heard that Kristi L. Noem, the homeland security secretary, was holding a news conference on the federal presence there. He asked the people escorting him if he could attend it. Noem was in the middle of criticizing local leaders as “socialists” and “burdensome” for not coordinating more closely with the federal government when Padilla stepped to the front of the room and began to ask why she was using a relatively small number of immigrant criminals targeted for deportation to justify what he saw as an outsize federal response.

In hindsight, Padilla says he realized he was interrupting but thought officials might ask him to wait until the news conference was done. Instead, federal agents started clutching and pushing him.

“Sir! Sir! Hands off! Hands off!” Padilla told one of the agents.

“I am Senator Alex Padilla,” he said next, haltingly and with jagged breath. “I have questions for the secretary.”

Padilla tried to steady himself and push forward as he kept asking his question, but was eventually shoved out of the room without finishing.

“Hands off!” he told the agents.

What followed was an eerie silence. Inside, the TV cameras swiveled back to Noem, who continued her remarks after a brief pause. Meanwhile, federal agents marched Padilla away from the double doors, then muscled him to his knees, and then flat on the gray-carpeted floor. He uttered some words in the struggle, but then there was only the quiet click of the handcuffs. Padilla said nothing.

“I knew that as uncomfortable as it was, as wrong as I felt as it was, that if I responded to what was happening the wrong way, it would give those agents a license to escalate their physical actions against me even more so, which is a —”

He paused, looking for the right words.

“— a hard notion.”

Padilla grew up in Pacoima, a working-class, heavily immigrant neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. Padilla’s own parents came illegally from Mexico, his father Santos told The Washington Post in 2021, and found work: his father as a short-order cook in diners and his mother as a housekeeper. (They later gained legal residency and U.S. citizenship.) The younger Padilla studied to become an engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology but got involved in politics in the ’90s after California voters passed a measure barring undocumented immigrants from accessing social services. He was elected to the Los Angeles City Council, then the California state Senate, and then became the secretary of state. In 2021 he was first appointed U.S. senator to fill the vacancy left by Kamala Harris.

Padilla is 6-foot-4 and broad-shouldered, but has cut a low-key figure in Congress — he calls himself an “EngiNERD” on social media and has tea bags on offer to guests in his Capitol Hill office. His run-in with officers at the Noem event has raised his profile, at least for the moment, as evidenced by the two Capitol Police officers standing watch in front of the glass doors of his Senate office, accompanying him at the request of Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer.

Since the incident, Padilla has emphasized one point: that if this is how the administration treats a senator, they could be treating ordinary people in detention much worse. On Tuesday, in the Senate subway on the way to give a speech on the floor, he said he hoped his colleagues would realize the incident wasn’t just about him or just about immigrants but also about the right of U.S. citizens to question their government. He said he might be able to tell if he was changing minds based on his colleagues’ body language and what they said to him.

Over 30 of Padilla’s Democratic colleagues listened intently as he recounted the questions swirling in his mind during the incident.

“What will my wife think? What will our boys think? And I also remember asking myself: If this aggressive escalation is the result of someone speaking up against the abuses and overreach of the Trump administration, was it really worth it?”

A few Republicans also listened — though they slipped out of the chamber once he finished without addressing him face to face, and not all of them were eager to discuss it afterward.

“You know, he’s a good friend. I just wanted to be supportive,” said Sen. John Boozman (R-Arkansas), boarding one of the underground trolleys.

“Well, he just invited me,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), before quickly heading back into the chamber.

“I attended a speech. I like Alex Padilla,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), as the doors of an elevator outside the chamber closed.

The elevator doors opened back up. Tillis had more to say. He called the treatment Padilla received “absolutely disgusting” while adding that a standard should not be set where senators are comfortable interrupting a high-ranking official’s news conference.

“There was a piece there that you have to take personal responsibility for. And everything that happened outside the door — there needs to be a debrief there and ask them why the hell they thought that was appropriate,” Tillis said. On Wednesday, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Jamie Raskin, sent a letter to FBI Director Kash Patel asking for a briefing and an investigation of the incident.

“The whole encounter just baffled me and didn’t make sense to me,” said Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyoming), “but I do know this. I know a genuinely gentle, kind person when I see one, and I’m a pretty good judge of character. And Alex Padilla is a kind, gentle person.” (When asked whether she had tried to get answers on what had happened, Lummis said she’d been too busy with other issues.)

The floor speech was an attempt by Padilla to keep the focus on immigration and the administration’s response to those who question their tactics. Over the weekend, the news seemed to move on to other events — a military parade in Washington; a violent attack on lawmakers and their spouses in Minnesota and the subsequent manhunt.

Who will the encounter really resonate with? Christian Arana, the vice president of civic power and policy at the Latino Community Foundation in Los Angeles, recalled a conversation he had about the incident with his immigrant father, who wondered “why they would humiliate someone like him like that.”

“Doesn’t he have a right to be there and ask questions on all of our behalf?’” Arana remembered his father asking.

“I just kept telling my dad that, you know, luckily, Alex Padilla is a United States senator,” Arana said in an interview. “He is going to have a profound amount of public support, and we saw that with his colleagues on the Democratic side. But just imagine everyone else, especially people who are currently being held in detention, like: Who’s fighting for them right now?”

In Kissimmee, Florida, Cecilia Gonzalez Herrera saw in Padilla someone who was willing to fight. She’s an immigrant from Venezuela and a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits challenging the administration’s attempts to end legal status for some Venezuelans, and she watched in disbelief with her friends.

“We all kind of shared that same feeling like: Are we living this all over again? Are we living Venezuela 2.0? And we aren’t joking.”

She added: “As a Floridian myself, when I see my two senators will not do so, I take a lot of pride in seeing that there are members of the U.S. Senate who are willing to take a clear stance in supporting immigrants and what is right.”

In recent days, Padilla said, his friends and colleagues have been asking him whether he thought this would’ve happened if he wasn’t a Latino man. “It’s a very good question,” he said.

How would he answer it?

“Still processing,” he said. “But, but, but it wasn’t anybody else. It happened. It was me. And I tried to handle it the best way I could, to maintain my composure, because of what it meant.”

Was it really worth it? Padilla says he didn’t get the answers he was looking for. While he was being escorted away from the news conference, he said a voice behind him told agents to let him go. It was Corey Lewandowski, Padilla said, the former Trump campaign adviser and now an aide to Noem, offering a meeting with the secretary. Padilla said that at the meeting, Noem offered “the same old company line that they’re targeting the dangerous criminals, and you should see some of these violent felons.” (A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.)

The senator says he asked for some data and is waiting for a follow-up meeting to be scheduled. In a Fox News interview after the incident, Noem called Padilla’s actions “political theater” and said she would’ve met with him if he’d asked — but that once they met, they’d agreed to keep talking. She said nobody knew who Padilla was until agents were trying to detain him.

And what if in a few days the country moves on, and forgets about the senator’s confrontation?

“I’m not worried about people forgetting,” Padilla added later, in the Capitol. “I’m worried about people being so fearful because they see the extreme tactics of this administration that they’ll be too fearful to speak up.”

The evening of Padilla’s speech, a split-screen moment unfolded. In New York, federal immigration officials arrested a mayoral candidate as he tried to escort a defendant from an appearance at immigration court. Online, Democrats sent a fundraising email signed by Padilla, with the subject line: “We will not be intimidated and we will not be deterred.”

For his part, Padilla says he’s been heartened to hear words of support from his Republican colleagues, even if only in private. Over the weekend, one senator, whom Padilla would not name, called him to check on him and hear what happened.

“They said, ‘Well, I get it, Alex, you have to represent your state.’ And my response was, ‘I’m not just representing my state, I’m representing workers in your state,’” he recalled.

“And then, there was just silence.”

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