Alex Padilla says FBI escorted him to Noem press conference before he was wrestled to the ground for interrupting

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Source: The Independent

Friday 13 June 2025 12:05 EDT


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. 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.”

Read more: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/alex-padilla-kristi-noem-fbi-escort-b2769686.html