Sen. Padilla denies clash at news conference was a ploy for attention
California Sen. Alex Padilla is pushing back against claims he was deliberately trying to make a scene when he was forcibly removed from a Department of Homeland Security press conference with Kristi Noem last Thursday.
"Nothing could be further from the truth. Again, what are the odds?" the Democrat told CNN's Dana Bash on Sunday on "State of the Union."
Padilla told Bash he was in a room at the Wilshire Federal Building in Los Angeles for a scheduled briefing from U.S. Northern Command when he learned Noem was giving a press conference "a couple doors down."
The senator said he asked the FBI agents escorting him around the building if he could listen in.
"When I heard the secretary, not for the first time in that press conference, talk about the needing to liberate the people of Los Angeles from their duly elected mayor and governor, it was at that moment that I chose to try to ask a question," Padilla said.
He was then forced out of the room by officials, pushed to the ground in a hallway just outside and, despite previously identifying himself as a U.S. senator, handcuffed with his hands behind his back.
For over a week, Los Angeles has been rocked by protests around President Donald Trump's expansive deportation and immigration agenda.
Trump's decision to federalize the California National Guard — and the White House push to send active-duty Marines to the city — despite forceful opposition from Mayor Karen Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom — has only escalated tensions, critics charge. An appeals court last week temporarily blocked a judge's order that Trump's call-up of the National Guard was unconstitutional.
Republicans — the White House chief among them — framed the confrontation involving Padilla as a ploy for attention.
'Padilla didn't want answers; he wanted attention," White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement Thursday. House Speaker Mike Johnson said the incident warranted a censure. "Perhaps he wanted the scene," Noem told Fox News.
But Democrats raised alarms — both at the treatment of California's senior senator and at the administration's heavy-handed tactics in Los Angeles.
Fellow California Sen. Adam Schiff told NBC's Kristen Welker that asking questions at press conferences like Noem's on Thursday is a part of Padilla's oversight responsibilities.
"This is not some rabble-rouser," Schiff said on "Meet the Press." "And to see him mistreated that way and tackled to the ground and shackled that way and in the midst of what we're seeing more broadly in Los Angeles is just atrocious. And I think all of us that work with him reacted with that kind of revulsion."
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