‘If this is how they respond to a senator with a question, imagine what they’re doing across the country,’ says Padilla
Padilla goes on:
If this is how this administration responds to a senator with a question, if this is how the Department of Homeland Security responds to a senator with a question, you can only imagine what they’re doing to farm workers, to cooks, to day laborers, throughout the LA community and throughout California and throughout the country. We will hold this administration accountable. We’ll have more to say in the coming days.
Key events
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House votes to pull $1.1bn in federal funding from NPR and PBS
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Democratic National Committee chair blasts ‘sickening assault’
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Kamala Harris decries ‘stunning abuse of power’
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Elizabeth Warren says Trump administration ‘wants to shut down’ normal functions of government
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Padilla urges people to protest peacefully ‘just like I was’
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‘If this is how they respond to a senator with a question, imagine what they’re doing across the country,’ says Padilla
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‘I began to ask a question’: statement from senator Alex Padilla
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Video from Padilla’s staff shows senator was not resisting when forced to the ground and handcuffed by FBI
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Noem doubles down on claim that Padilla didn’t identify himself and ‘lunged’ toward her
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DHS claims Padilla ‘lunged’ toward Noem ‘without identifying himself’ – despite footage showing he identified himself
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‘Manhandling’ of senator ‘a sickening disgrace’, says Jeffries
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Removal of Padilla ‘outrageous, dictatorial and shameful’, says Newsom
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Footage of senator’s forcible removal ‘sickened my stomach,’ says Schumer
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Senator’s forced removal from press briefing was ‘abhorrent and outrageous’, says LA mayor
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Senator Alex Padilla not currently detained after being forced to the ground and handcuffed, his office says
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Noem claims she’s left voicemails for Gavin Newsom and he hasn’t returned her calls
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California senator Alex Padilla forcibly removed from Noem press conference
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Noem repeats Trump administration’s claims that protests are being ‘funded’ and have turned violent
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Kristi Noem to give remarks on anti-Ice protests in Los Angeles
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Trump’s birthday parade may be cancelled over thunderstorms – Times of London
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Hegseth refuses to commit to obeying courts on marines in LA
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Kilmar Ábrego García seeks sanctions against Trump administration in wrongful deportation case
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Trump says he may soon hike auto tariffs in bid to get more US production
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‘He does like me’ : Trump says of Musk as he praises Tesla
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US immigration agency flies Predator drones over LA protests
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Texas governor says more than 5,000 national guard troops deployed
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Hegseth questioned whether Pentagon has plans for potential Greenland, Panama invasions
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Sanctuary states testify on impact of Trump immigration policies
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Trump says business leaders telling him mass deportations are taking good workers away
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Key takeaways from Gavin Newsom this morning on Trump’s use of national guard in LA
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Newsom calls Trump a ‘stone cold liar’ and says president didn’t speak to him about sending troops to LA
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‘This isn’t an isolated incident’: Trump’s show of military force in LA was years in the making
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‘Morale is not great’: troops and marines deeply troubled by LA deployment
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US immigration officials raid California farms as Trump ramps up conflict
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Marines to deploy on LA streets within two days with authority to detain civilians
Chris Stein
Members of the congressional Hispanic caucus said they paid visits to the offices of the Senate majority leader John Thune and the speaker of the House Mike Johnson after the handcuffing of the California senator Alex Padilla, but that neither of the Republican leaders were available to meet with them.
“Senator Padilla was there to express his opinion. Senator Padilla was there to ask questions. Senator Padilla was there because his office is also in that same building. That’s why senator Padilla was there,” said the Democratic representative Adriano Espaillat, the caucus’s chair. “I feel this amounts to an assault, a felony, and we want a full and complete investigation of this matter immediately.”
He tied the incident to Donald Trump’s hardline enforcement of immigration policy, which has been marked by aggressive waves of arrests by federal agents of people suspected of being in the country illegally.
“We are concerned that this is totally out of control. The weaponization of immigration has taken us to a place in America where we’ve never been before. So divided, so split, so violent and aggressive that obviously you saw those officers there, that detail there, whoever it was, very aggressive, while the senator attempted several times to say that he was a US senator, he identified himself,” Espaillat said.
“We will not let this go. We will continue to push forward. We are here to save America from a dictatorship.”
Chris Stein
I am in the Capitol, and just heard the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson defend the handcuffing of the California senator Alex Padilla.
“A sitting member of Congress should not act like that. It is beneath a member of the Congress, it is beneath a US senator,” he said, calling Padilla’s actions “wildly inappropriate”.
He added: “They’re supposed to lead by example. That is not a good example. We have to turn the temperature down in this country and not escalate it. The Democrat party is on the wrong side. They’re defending lawbreakers, and now they’re acting like lawbreakers themselves.”
Johnson accused Padilla of “charging a cabinet secretary at a press conference”.
Asked whether Padilla should be investigated, he replied: “It’s not my decision to make. I’m not in that chamber, but I do think that it merits immediate attention by my other colleagues over there … I think that that behavior, at a minimum, it rises to the level of a censure.”
As he spoke, Democratic lawmakers walking by heckled him, with one yelling: “That’s a lie!”
House votes to pull $1.1bn in federal funding from NPR and PBS
The House narrowly voted on Thursday to cut about $9.4bn in spending already approved by Congress as Donald Trump’s administration looks to follow through on work by the so-called “department of government efficiency” when it was overseen by Elon Musk, the Associated Press reports.
The package targets foreign aid programs and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides money for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, as well as thousands of public radio and television stations around the country. The vote was 214-212.
Republicans are characterizing the spending as wasteful and unnecessary, but Democrats say the rescissions are hurting the United States’s standing in the world and will lead to needless deaths.
“Cruelty is the point,” the Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries of New York, said of the proposed spending cuts.
The Trump administration is employing a tool rarely used in recent years that allows the president to transmit a request to Congress to cancel previously appropriated funds. That triggers a 45-day clock in which the funds are frozen pending congressional action. If Congress fails to act within that period, then the spending stands.
As NPR reports, the measure “would slash $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which allocates nearly all of the funds to local stations, for the next two fiscal years. By law, that money is supposed to be approved in advance as part of an effort to insulate public broadcasting from political influence over fleeting issues.”
The broadcaster notes that the representative Steve Scalise, the Republican majority leader, said last week that the legislation “codifies President Trump’s cuts to wasteful foreign aid initiatives within the State Department and USAID, as well as woke public broadcasting, including NPR and PBS, at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is a business the federal government shouldn’t even be in”.
“NPR and PBS are targeted here today precisely because they are so good at delivering the truth,” the representative Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat, countered. “Trump doesn’t want a country of engaged, informed Americans. He prefers those who salute on command.”
Cutting funding for NPR and PBS has been a goal of Republicans for decades. In a 2012 presidential election debate, the Republican nominee Mitt Romney said that he would cut the federal subsidy for PBS as a way to tackle the national debt, even though, as he said: “I like PBS, I love Big Bird.”
One result of the years of complaints from conservatives about federal spending on public broadcasting is that many Americans vastly overestimate how much of the federal budget goes to non-partisan, fact-based journalism and educational programming.
In a poll conducted for CNN in 2011, respondents were asked to estimate what share of the federal budget was spent on public broadcasting. The correct answer is that CPB gets about one one-hundredth of a percent (0.01%) of the federal budget.
According to the research done for CNN, just 27% of Americans knew that the money for PBS and NPR was less than 1% of government spending. Remarkably, 40% guessed that the share was between 1% and 5% and nearly a third of Americans said it was in excess of 5% . Seven percent of those surveyed guessed that more than half of the entire federal budget was spent on television and radio broadcasts.
At a hearing in Washington on Thursday, the representative Delia Ramirez, an Illinois Democrat, just screened video of the senator Alex Padilla’s staffer being prevented from filming as his boss was handcuffed by FBI agents.
After playing a section of the clip where Padilla’s staff member was told to stop filming, Ramirez said: “They don’t want you recording so you don’t see how they violate due process repeatedly. I want to make sure that you see that footage.”
Ramirez: They don’t want you recording so you don’t see how they violate due process repeatedly. This is a US Senator asking a question and in return, he is pulled, shoved down the floor, slammed to the ground pic.twitter.com/kJnbzSBv8V
— Acyn (@Acyn) June 12, 2025
“This is a United States senator asking a question of secretary Noem, and in return, he is pulled from the press conference, shoved down the floor slammed to the ground,” she added.
“What happened to Senator Alex Padilla is nothing less than an outrageous abuse of power and a direct assault on our democracy,” Roman Palomares, the president of the League of United Latin American Citizens (Lulac), a civil rights group, said in a statement that linked to video of the senator being forced to the ground and handcuffed by federal agents on Thursday.
He added:
That a Latino US Senator was physically removed from a public press event simply because he dared to ask tough questions of a federal cabinet official is unacceptable and will not be silently tolerated in our country. LULAC demands an immediate investigation and appropriate charges against those responsible for laying hands on an elected lawmaker performing his constitutional duty. Every American – regardless of party – should be enraged by this attack on free speech and civil accountability. We salute Senator Padilla for his courage and resolve in standing up for our community and the Constitution.
Democratic National Committee chair blasts ‘sickening assault’
Ken Martin, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, joined in the criticism of what he called “the sickening assault” on the senator Alex Padilla.
In a statement, Martin wrote:
This assault on US Senator Alex Padilla has sent a violent message to all of America: If you dissent against Donald Trump and openly disagree with the government, then you are not safe in our country. It doesn’t matter if you are a duly elected official – if you ask questions, if you stand up to Trump and Kristi Noem’s abuse of power, then government thugs will come after you. Make no mistake: This horrifying escalation of violence is straight out of an authoritarian playbook. Trump is a weak man, yet he’s desperate to look strong as more Americans become enraged by the chaos he’s inciting in California. His dangerous approach to immigration enforcement stokes fear, profiles Black and Brown communities, rips families apart, and sows violence.
Trump is out of control. He’s now using federal law enforcement to silence those who are exercising their rights. This has nothing to do with law and order – it’s a disgusting abuse of power.
Kamala Harris decries ‘stunning abuse of power’
Kamala Harris, the former vice-president who previously held the California senate seat now occupied by Alex Padilla, also denounced his treatment by armed federal agents on Thursday.
Harris shared video of the incident on X, with the comment:
United States Senator Alex Padilla was representing the millions of Californians who are demanding answers to this Administration’s actions in Southern California. This is a shameful and stunning abuse of power.
Elizabeth Warren says Trump administration ‘wants to shut down’ normal functions of government
The senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in a social media video that the forcible removal of her colleague Alex Padilla from a news conference, while trying to conduct oversight of the federal response to protests in LA, is a sign that the White House does not want Congress to do its job.
“What we are really talking about here is a Trump administration that just wants to shut down the ordinary functions of government,” Warren said on her way to raise the matter on the Senate floor.
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On Tuesday, a federal grand jury in New Jersey indicted another congressional Democrat, the Representative LaMonica McIver, for allegedly interfering with law enforcement during an oversight visit to an immigration detention center in Newark.
The forced removal of the senator Alex Padilla from the homeland security secretary’s news conference on Thursday has been condemned by Vanessa Cárdenas, the executive director of America’s Voice, an advocacy group dedicated to immigration reforms that would put “11 million undocumented Americans on a path to full citizenship”.
Cárdenas said in a statement:
The image of a sitting US Senator being violently thrown to the ground and handcuffed – for simply demanding answers from DHS Secretary Noem at a public press conference – is nothing short of chilling. This is not how a democracy operates. These are the brutal, silencing tactics of authoritarian regimes, not the United States of America. We unequivocally condemn this outrageous assault on a duly elected official who represents millions of Americans. Senator Padilla was doing his job – holding power to account. The fact that he was met with force instead of answers is a shameful reflection of an administration that fears scrutiny and thrives on intimidation. This cannot stand.
As we reported earlier, video of the incident recorded by Padilla’s staff shows that he was forced to the ground and placed in handcuffs by three federal agents, two from the FBI and a third wearing a shirt that appeared to identify him as a member of homeland security investigations (HSI). A more widely viewed clip, recorded by a correspondent for Fox News, ended before Padilla was shoved to the ground by the federal agents.
Padilla urges people to protest peacefully ‘just like I was’
“There is a lot of concern, there is a lot of tension, there is a lot of anxiety, and a lot of people are beginning to make plans for what they may or may not do come this Saturday,” Alex Padilla said after he was forcibly removed from a news conference held by the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, in Los Angeles.
I encourage everybody to please peacefully protest – just like I was calmly and peacefully listening in that press conference.
California governor Gavin Newsom echoes this point, posting on X alongside the image of Alex Padilla being handcuffed on the floor:
If they can handcuff a US Senator for asking a question, imagine what they will do to you.
‘If this is how they respond to a senator with a question, imagine what they’re doing across the country,’ says Padilla
Padilla goes on:
If this is how this administration responds to a senator with a question, if this is how the Department of Homeland Security responds to a senator with a question, you can only imagine what they’re doing to farm workers, to cooks, to day laborers, throughout the LA community and throughout California and throughout the country. We will hold this administration accountable. We’ll have more to say in the coming days.
‘I began to ask a question’: statement from senator Alex Padilla
Alex Padilla is reading a statement to the press now.
He says he and his colleagues have been asking DHS for answers on their “increasingly extreme immigration enforcement actions” and their queries have been met with little to no information.
He came to the press conference to hear what Kristi Noem had to say, he said, emphasizing “the right for people to peacefully protest and to stand up for their first amendment – their fundamental – rights”:
I was there peacefully. I had a question, and so I began to ask a question.
I was almost immediately forcibly removed from the room. I was forced to the ground, and I was handcuffed. I was not arrested. I was not detained.
Video from Padilla’s staff shows senator was not resisting when forced to the ground and handcuffed by FBI
Senator Alex Padilla was forced to the ground and handcuffed by FBI agents, despite not resisting, in a longer video clip of the incident provided to a local Fox News anchor by the senator’s staff.
The video, which was posted on social media by the local FOX LA anchor Elex Michaelson, is significant because it shows more of the incident than a viral clip posted online by a national Fox News correspondent, Bill Melugin, which cuts off before the senator was forced to the ground and placed in handcuffs.
The longer video shows that Padilla was forced first to his knees and then pressed face-down on the floor by a pair of FBI agents and a third officer, whose shirt had the initials HSI, used by homeland security investigations officers.
This extended view of the incident clearly shows that Padilla was forcibly placed in handcuffs long after he had identified himself and allowed the federal agents to push him out of the room where the homeland security secretary Kristi Noem was holding a news conference.
Towards the end of the clip, the person filming is blocked from seeing what is happening and told they are not allowed to record, to which they reply: “That’s my boss, I have to record.”
Despite the fact that the video from Padilla’s staff was provided to Fox LA, the local station posted the less complete version, which ends before the senator was forced to the ground, on its YouTube channel.