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“Democratic US Senator Alex Padilla was forcibly removed from a news conference held by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in Los Angeles [last] Thursday and placed in handcuffs. Noem was giving an update on immigration enforcement after nearly a week of protests in the city, when Senator Padilla interrupted and started shouting a question…
“Video of the incident shows the senator struggling with multiple Secret Service agents before being shoved out of the room and dragged away, before uniformed FBI agents placed him on the ground and arrested him… ‘I'm OK,’ [Padilla said after being released]. ‘But if they can do that to me, a United States senator... what are they doing to a lot of folks out there when the cameras are not on?’… Noem said she met with Padilla for 15 minutes afterwards, saying while they ‘probably disagree on 90% of the topics’, the pair would continue to talk.” BBC
“New York City Comptroller and Democratic mayoral candidate Brad Lander was arrested by federal agents at an immigration court Tuesday… As a group of agents moved in to detain a man who had exited a courtroom, Lander locked arms with the immigrant and demanded to see a judicial warrant. For more than 40 seconds, agents tried to physically separate the two, pulling both men down the hall in a chaotic scrum…
“Eventually, the agents wrested the two apart, then grabbed Lander’s arms and put them behind his back. ‘You’re obstructing,’ an agent told Lander. ‘I’m not obstructing. I’m standing right here in the hallway,’ Lander said as he was being handcuffed.” AP News
The left is critical of the administration, arguing that it should not be arresting politicians for asking questions.
“Nearly as disturbing as the footage is the fact that even though the incident is on tape, the Trump administration attempted to lie baldly about what happened. Officials said Padilla never identified himself as a senator and that security personnel thought he was an attacker; video shows him audibly identifying himself and wearing a U.S. Senate shirt. They said he lunged at Noem; video shows nothing of the sort…
“The most that can be said is that Padilla’s question disrupted Noem’s spiel at the press conference. According to the senator’s explanation, the Department of Homeland Security had refused to adequately answer questions from his office for weeks, and when he realized that Noem was holding a press conference at the same federal building where he was receiving a briefing, he decided to attend… House Speaker Mike Johnson called on the Senate to censure Padilla, though for what was unclear. Daring to challenge a Trump-administration official?”
David A. Graham, The Atlantic
Regarding Lander, “he is holding on to a migrant ICE is trying to arrest, and Lander demands, again and again, that they produce a warrant. He doesn’t yell. He doesn’t attack any of the law enforcement officers on the scene — one of whom has a black ski mask pulled down over his face. But he doesn’t let go of the man he’s trying to protect, either. As the ICE agents turn to arrest him, Lander calmly and repeatedly insists that their actions are illegal…
“He understood the system well enough to know where to be and when. His tactics were insistent while avoiding unnecessary confrontation… I was gripped by two thoughts. First, we are very far down a very dark path when ICE agents are arresting elected officials. (The Department of Homeland Security says Lander was ‘arrested for assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer,’ a lie so brazen, given that this is all on tape for everyone to see, that it makes the whole episode even more chilling.) And second, Lander sure looked like the kind of guy you’d want in charge at a time like this.”
Ezra Klein, New York Times
Some argue, “Democratic senators and representatives need to follow [their] lead. Get angry. Take the fight to the administration. Go after Trump’s minions while they’re spouting vicious lies on live TV. And yes, even get arrested…
“Trump represents the gravest direct threat to American civil liberties since the Civil War. And just as what we’re seeing is not normal, stopping the massive tide of outright corruption, militarism, and fascism we’re witnessing cannot be done through the normal democratic procedures. We need to move beyond them. Now is the time for direct action—to take to the streets in our communities and confront the regime wherever its leaders dare to show their faces.”
Ross Rosenfeld, New Republic
The right is critical of the Democrats, arguing that they were staging a political spectacle and trying to be arrested.
The right is critical of the Democrats, arguing that they were staging a political spectacle and trying to be arrested.
“Imagine for a moment that a committee on which Senator Padilla sits was conducting an actual oversight hearing on Capitol Hill and that in the middle of the hearing, Secretary Noem or one of her subordinate agents — on no authority other than the fact that anyone can enter the Capitol and watch public hearings — barged in and demanded that Padilla and his colleagues answer the Homeland Security Department’s questions…
“[Moreover] The videos thus far available provide scant reason to believe the agents knew Padilla was a U.S. senator. The fact that, in the heat of the moment, he announced himself as a senator is irrelevant; security agents never take such proclamations at face value — and would not do so here, under circumstances in which Padilla sure wasn’t acting like a senator…
“In a fraught atmosphere, the agents had to make a snap decision… Naturally, they reacted by treating him as a threat. You can say they were too heavy-handed; imagine the reaction, though, if they’d given him more leeway, he turned out not to be a U.S. senator, and he hurt somebody. Instead of ‘heavy-handed,’ we’d be asking how the hell the agents could have let an assailant get so close to the top official they were supposed to be protecting.”
Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review
Regarding Lander, “[he] got exactly what he wanted Tuesday: A high-profile arrest that might somehow salvage a political career … Lander repeatedly demanded to see a warrant for a guy ICE was detaining outside federal immigration court, holding his hand on the arrestee’s shoulder in an obvious bid to obstruct the agents enough to provoke an arrest. Unsurprisingly, the charges got dropped after a few hours; Homeland Security has far more important things to do.”
Editorial Board, New York Post
“Everyone is getting what they want out of these performances. The Democratic lawmakers who find themselves in handcuffs get the publicity they seek. The Trump administration officials who are making examples of their political opponents relish the opportunity to demonstrate that they mean it when they maintain that ‘no one is above the law.’…
“To some degree, all the parties involved deserve censure for their participation in it, but Democrats deserve far more of it. They are provoking law enforcement as a political tactic. They are promoting and promulgating the notion that the officers who are simply doing their jobs, and without much enthusiasm in the process, are engaged in grotesque acts of political oppression that should be exclusive to authoritarian regimes. They want to find themselves in prosecutors’ crosshairs only so they can claim that they are being subjugated.”
Noah Rothman, National Review
