Bill Essayli is out for revenge
Bill Essayli, the recently appointed 39-year-old U.S. attorney for California's central district, spent years in Sacramento angrily chafing at one-party rule — elected but impotent. Now he's ready to show the state's Democrats how it feels to be powerless.
He has already charged David Huerta, one of California's most powerful union leaders, with felony conspiracy for allegedly impeding an ICE arrest by participating in a protest. On Thursday, he stood by as California Sen. Alex Padilla was handcuffed and forced to the ground at a press conference hosted by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. Now, other Democratic politicians say they fear being seen at immigration protests, confident that Essayli will seize any chance to put former colleagues behind bars and revel in the fallout.
'As legislators, we know fully well that if he has an opportunity and can somehow connect us to any violence or any disruptions that are going on, he is going to try to arrest us,' Assemblymember Corey Jackson said in an interview. 'It makes me feel crazy that I have to say these things. But it's the truth.'
Essayli is President Donald Trump's man on the immigration battlefield of Los Angeles — a rapid status shift for a politician who not long ago was a junior, little-liked Republican state lawmaker. As an agitator turned enforcer with an ax to grind and the full weight of federal law enforcement at his back, Essayli is animated by many of the same vengeful impulses that drive the president who appointed him. (Essayli did not respond to interview requests for this story.)
'The Democrats that bullied Bill Essayli should be very worried,' said Assemblymember Carl DeMaio, a Republican who worked to get Essayli elected before serving alongside him. 'They've never been held accountable. But life changes.'
Any story about the arc of Bill Essayli's career should probably begin on April 10, 2002.
While visiting the Wells Fargo branch where his mother worked, the 17-year-old Essayli witnessed a bank robber leaving the building. As Essayli tells it, he instinctively jumped in his car to follow the suspect, writing down the thief's license number so he could report the vehicle to federal investigators. His actions that day earned him a personal letter from then-FBI Director Robert Mueller, a man who would later go on to investigate Essayli's current boss, who praised the teenager's 'tremendous initiative.'
Raised by Lebanese immigrant parents on the western edge of the Inland Empire, east of Los Angeles, Essayli was long drawn to law enforcement, serving as a volunteer in Corona's police department Explorer program.
After becoming the first member of his family to graduate college, Essayli attended Chapman University School of Law, which has been home to prominent conservatives like John Eastman and Hugh Hewitt. Essayli went into private practice before two years as a Riverside County prosecutor and four as an assistant U.S. attorney. In that role he worked on the deadly 2015 shooting and attempted bombing by alleged homegrown extremists in San Bernardino.
In 2018, Essayli became directly involved in politics, joining a campaign to repeal a gas-tax increase while mounting his own failed, somewhat moderate, candidacy for the state assembly. Four years later, after district lines were redrawn, Essayli ran again on a tough on crime and conservative school issues platform. He was the first Muslim elected to the California State Assembly, representing a diverse, semi-rural region in a district Trump won by 12 points in 2024.
But when the clean-cut Essayli came to Sacramento in 2022, he made little effort to conform to the capital's hobnobby culture and was quite open about how much he detested it. Even fellow Republicans who agreed with his politics disagreed with his tactics and aggressive stance toward Democrats and his own party. His political life, as his friend DeMaio described it, was a 'lonely' one. Upon arriving in the capital he hung the 2002 letter from Mueller on his office wall.
Essayli quickly made a name for himself by taking up red-meat conservative causes and authoring bills that would require school staff to notify parents if their children might be transgender and mandate government identification to vote. He raged against the state's Covid-19 restrictions and criticized critical race theory.
None of his bills became law, but Essayli distinguished himself on the Assembly floor with his penchant for political theater. His pattern of outlandish outbursts and near-physical altercations were of the sort that largely disappeared from the legislative process in the nineteenth century (Jackson himself once had to be restrained from Essayli after the two clashed on the Assembly floor).
Other lawmakers, staff and lobbyists traded accounts of their favorite Essayli episodes. In one, he called the speaker pro tempore a 'fucking liar' on the Assembly floor. In another he banged a fist on his desk in petulant fury, shouting into the void of his muted microphone as state lawmakers looked on.
To like-minded conservatives, this presented a vision of how a disruptive, aggressive opposition party should function. DeMaio, who was elected to the Assembly two years after Essayli and has followed in his footsteps, said he showed how an opposition party could 'illustrate how the other side is wrong' even if you don't get 'drinks paid for at the bars.'
Essayli wasn't worried about rubbing people the wrong way, according to his former chief of staff Shawn Lewis. On a personal level, he was kind and even funny. But Essayli, according to Lewis, was also driven by 'an unshakable sense of what is right and wrong.' The outbursts were no performance, but rather the outward projections of a true believer's frustrations.
'Bill Essayli sees things as they can and should be, not as they are,' Lewis said.
But at least some political observers believe that Essayli's moves were calculated. There are few avenues to power for a hard-right Republican in Democrat-dominated California. Serving as an avatar for the Trump administration's talking points within the state Legislature was one of them. And the performances led to even bigger platforms: regular appearances on Fox News that won him a casual following nationally among the MAGA faithful.
'I think he's a very smart guy,' Anthony Rendon, a former Assembly speaker, said of Essayli. 'There's nothing Bill does that isn't very well thought-out.'
In April 2025, Essayli announced that he would be leaving Sacramento to accept an interim appointment as the top federal prosecutor for seven Southern California counties with a population of nearly 20 million people.
Elsewhere, Trump sought out personal confidants, longtime political allies and loyal defenders to fill U.S. attorney's offices. In his hometown of New York City, Trump named Jay Clayton, who had served as his appointee atop the Securities and Exchange Commission, to the post. Trump's former personal attorney Alina Habba was named the prosecutor in New Jersey, home to Trump's Bedminster golf course. In Washington, D.C., he has placed conservative legal activist Ed Martin, a former lawyer for Jan. 6 defendants, and Fox News host Jeanine Pirro into powerful prosecutorial positions.
Essayli does not have the same direct connection to Trump's circle, but his appointment vindicated the way Essayli had spent his brief time in Sacramento. Upon being named to the post, he made clear he was ready to adopt Trump's ethos.
"I intend to implement the President's mission to restore trust in our justice system and pursue those who dare to cause harm to the United States and the People of our nation,' Essayli said.
Newly backed by a small army of lawyers and special agents, Essayli is aiming at many of the same targets that eluded him as a politician.
In April, he launched a task force to investigate fraud and corruption within homelessness funding sources administered by California's Democratic officials. In May, he threw his support behind a Justice Department investigation into Title IX violations in the state, alleging that transgender athletes were 'violating women's civil rights.' At the beginning of June, Essayli warned an air quality management district in Southern California to abandon plans to impose fees on gas appliances, threatening 'all appropriate action' to stop the regulations.
But it is his role backing Trump's immigration enforcement actions that has given Essayli his biggest opportunity to flex his newfound power. Earlier this week, prominent conservative commentator Marc Thiessen suggested that Essayli may have found a workaround for sanctuary city laws, by charging migrants held on state charges with federal crimes in an effort to force local officials to turn them over to ICE. (Thiessen did not respond to a request to explain further.)
In Los Angeles, his authority ran up against the most basic form of dissent: public protest. As immigration enforcement officials, aided by Essayli's search warrants and federal agents, launched targeted raids of migrant communities, they were met by demonstrators who intended to stand in the way. On Monday, Essayli announced that his prosecutors would use social media and video evidence to pursue protesters who threw objects at officers. Yesterday, two protesters were charged with possessing Molotov cocktails, which Essayli said would be punished by up to 10 years in prison.
'I don't care who you are — if you impede federal agents, you will be arrested and prosecuted,' Essayli wrote on X after Huerta's arrest on June 6.
Immigrant advocacy and LGBTQ+ rights organizations allege that he intends to use that authority to 'prosecute his political opponents.'
'Bill Essayli spent his short career in the Legislature with a singular agenda: to attack the students and families he was supposed to serve,' said Kristi Hirst, the co-founder of Our Schools USA, an advocacy organization that pushes for LGBTQ-friendly school policies. 'Essayli is not interested in seeking justice.'
Those concerns have now manifested in a political campaign called Stop Essayli run by Jacob Daruvala, a former constituent of Essayli's and a local LGBTQ+ advocate. The lobbying effort, which remains something of a hail Mary, is aimed at persuading Sens. Adam Schiff and Padilla to block Essayli's official confirmation, which would rid him of his interim title.
If a permanent replacement is not confirmed within 120 days, the federal district court for his jurisdiction would instead appoint someone else to serve in the role until a Senate confirmation is successful.
But without the votes to block his path, it is only a delicate historical courtesy, which Schiff and Padilla will have to ask the Senate to respect, that stands between Essayli and a permanent assignment. Daruvala is asking California's senators to withhold their 'blue slips,' a Senate tradition in which committees defer to a nominee's home-state senators for guidance on confirmation.
There is something poetic in that question. After Essayli made his name defying the decorum of the California Legislature, it is only decorum that can halt his upward rise.
Jeremy B. White contributed to this report.
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