Both of Maine’s U.S. senators condemned the rough handcuffing of California Sen. Alex Padilla at Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s news conference in Los Angeles after he spoke up about immigration raids that have led to protests there and around the country.
Video showed a Secret Service agent on Noem’s security detail grabbing Padilla by his jacket and shoving him from the room as he tried to interrupt Noem’s Thursday news conference.
“I’m Sen. Alex Padilla,” he shouted in a halting voice. “I have questions for the secretary.”
Scuffling with officers outside the room, he can be heard bellowing, “Hands off!” He was later pushed to the ground and handcuffed in a hallway, with several officers atop him.
The shocking scene of a U.S. senator being aggressively removed from a Cabinet secretary’s news conference prompted immediate outrage from his Democratic colleagues. Images and video of the scuffle ricocheted through the halls of Congress, where stunned lawmakers demanded an immediate investigation and characterized the episode as another in a line of mounting threats to democracy by President Donald Trump’s administration.
Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, was traveling back from Washington on Thursday afternoon and held a news conference when he landed at the Portland Jetport, calling the episode “shocking and chilling and not the America I know.”
“What if this were me, and what if this were Portland?” he asked reporters.
The video of Padilla’s takedown was “disturbing,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said in a statement. She said she did not know what led up to the confrontation, but she thought he was handled roughly by police.
“It’s hard to imagine a justification for treating him like that,” she said.
In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said Padilla “chose disrespectful political theater and interrupted a live news conference.” They claimed erroneously that Padilla did not identify himself and that “officers acted appropriately.”
“If this is how this administration responds to a senator with a question … I can only imagine what they are doing to farmworkers, to cooks, to day laborers throughout the Los Angeles community, and throughout California and throughout the country,” Padilla told reporters later.
Noem told Fox LA afterward that she had a “great” conversation with Padilla after the scuffle, but called his approach “something that I don’t think was appropriate at all.”
Padilla, the son of immigrants from Mexico, has been a harsh Trump critic and his mass deportations agenda. Democratic senators quickly gathered in the Senate chamber denouncing the treatment of their colleague — a well-liked and respected senator — and urged Americans to understand what was happening.
The stark incident comes as Congress faces increasing episodes of encroachment on its authority. As a coequal branch of the U.S. government, the Trump administration is exerting its executive powers in untested ways.
As part of their work in Congress, lawmakers are responsible for providing oversight of the administration, its agencies and actions.
Several senators and representatives have been exercising their oversight roles by surveying the treatment of immigrants and others being detained as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation operation.
BDN writers Michael Shepherd and Billy Kobin and Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick and Seung Min Kim in Washington and Jaimie Ding contributed to this report.
