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California Democratic Senator Alex Padilla says FBI agents escorted him to a Kristi Noem press conference in Los Angeles on Thursday, where he was swarmed by security, contradicting the Trump administration’s version of events.
The Homeland Security Secretary was addressing the policing of this week’s anti-ICE protests in the California city, which saw President Donald Trump controversially send in the National Guard and Marines to keep order, when Padilla spoke up to ask a question and was roughly wrestled to the ground by Secret Service and FBI agents and eventually led away in handcuffs.
Noem, the agents, and the White House have since insisted that the senator “lurched” at the secretary. Still, Padilla insisted this was not the case, offering his own version of events on last night’s episode of MSNBC’s The Beat with Ari Melber.
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Interviewer Jacob Soboroff put it to Padilla that the agents responsible for the Noem event had said they had not recognized him and believed him to be an attacker and that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had since dismissed the whole affair as staged political theater.
“Well, first of all, that’s ridiculous. It’s a lie, but par for the course for this administration, right?” the senator responded.
He explained that he had been in the federal building in Westwood for a meeting about the administration’s plan to use Guantanamo Bay as a facility to hold undocumented migrants when he learned that Noem would be speaking just down the hall and had decided to ask her for answers in person given that the DHS had been “non-responsive” to his requests for information.
Padilla continued: “We’re, the whole time, being escorted in this federal building by somebody from the National Guard, somebody from the FBI. I’ve gone through screening. This is a federal building.
“They escort me over to that room. And I’m sitting in the back of the room, behind the cameras, behind the reporters, listening, listening. And at one point, it was just too much to take.”
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The senator said he became incensed by Noem’s repeated attacks on California Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass for, in her opinion, allowing the protests to get out of hand: “It was too much. And so I spoke up. I introduced myself and said I had a question.”
He said that claims by the secretary’s security detail that they did not know who he was were nonsense because he was wearing a polo shirt that was branded with the words “United States Senate.”
Padilla continued: “There was no threat. There was no lunging. I raised my voice to ask a question. And it took, what, maybe half a second before multiple agents were on me.”
Soboroff agreed that the Democrat had clearly identified himself as he spoke, referencing video of the incident, and put it to him that he had been accused of “barging” into the briefing.
“I didn’t barge into the room,” he replied. “As I mentioned, I was in a different conference room a couple doors down the hall. I let it be known, I’d like to go listen to the press conference. The folks that were escorting me in the building walked me over.
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“I didn’t even open the door. The door was opened for me. And I spent a few minutes in the back of the room just listening in until the rhetoric, the political rhetoric got to be too much to take. So I spoke up.”
Padilla’s fellow Democrats have expressed outrage over the episode, which Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said “sickened my stomach” and Newsom called “outrageous, dictatorial, and shameful.”
California Congressman Eric Swalwell has meanwhile called for Noem to resign.
But Republicans such as Marjorie Taylor Greene have insisted that Padilla was the aggressor and should be prosecuted.
