- 6/13/2025
During remarks on the Senate floor on Thursday, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) spoke about Sen. Alex Padilla's (D-CA) removal from a DHS press briefing.
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00:00Mr. President, a little more than a couple hours ago, my friend and colleague, Senator Alex Padilla, attended a press conference in the Federal Building in Los Angeles, being held by the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem.
00:23Instead of treating him with respect, instead of answering his questions, he was grabbed by her security detail.
00:31He was physically forced from the room, forced to the ground, his arms pinned behind his back.
00:37This assault on a member of the U.S. Senate is unlike anything I have ever seen, perhaps unlike anything anyone in this chamber has ever seen.
00:47And it crystallizes the threat posed to our country and its democracy.
00:53If the administration can so mistreat a member of this body, what can it do to every other American?
01:00What can it do to every other resident of the United States of America?
01:03What can it do to you?
01:06What can it do to your neighbor and to your community?
01:09The abusive treatment of Senator Alex Padilla, however, did not take place in isolation.
01:16It took place at a time of heightened tension in Los Angeles and around the nation.
01:22Earlier this week, I returned from my home in Los Angeles, a city in which thousands have peacefully protested the administration's harsh immigration policies
01:32and in which the president has ordered the mobilization of thousands of National Guardsmen and hundreds of Marines
01:40in order to deal with a few hundred vandals and miscreants that local law enforcement was more than capable of subduing.
01:49And the question is, why?
01:52Why order in the military if they are not necessary?
01:56Why order in the military over the objection of local and state officials?
02:00Why go to the expense?
02:02Why go to the trouble?
02:03Why undertake such an obvious provocation?
02:06Why in a city of over 500 square miles did Donald Trump believe it was necessary to escalate so dramatically
02:15over the vile acts of a small number of people in the space of a few blocks?
02:21These are some of the questions I imagine that Alex Padilla wanted to ask the Secretary of Homeland Security.
02:29But now today we must add one more question.
02:33Why would they treat Senator Alex Padilla with such forceful and disgraceful disregard, forcing him to the ground?
02:42Why?
02:44And the answer involves failure and distraction and disrespect and disregard.
02:53Failure of the president's immigration policy, failure of his economic policy, a desire to distract from these failures,
03:00disrespect of our military and its role in civil society, and disregard of our democracy and the principles upon which our nation was founded.
03:11Let's start with failure, the failure of Donald Trump's immigration policy, the failure in particular of his promise to deport massive numbers of violent criminals.
03:22A failure that was inevitable because it was based on a lie, a foundational lie, foundational to his campaign and to his presidency.
03:32The original lie of the Trump campaign, the one he spoke as he descended the golden escalator in 2015 and suggested to the American people
03:41that most of the folks coming to this country as immigrants were murderers and rapists and violent criminals bent on doing harm to the American people.
03:54That foreign nations had opened their prisons and let out their worst offenders so they could come to the United States and destroy our way of life.
04:01It was a big lie, it was an audacious lie, but a lie that the president hoped he could ride a wave of fear that he could in turn ride into office.
04:14The truth, of course, is the vast number of people coming to this country are peaceful, hard-working people who want nothing more than an opportunity to get ahead,
04:24to enjoy a good life, and to provide for themselves and for their family.
04:29The American people understood this.
04:32But they also understood that our border was broken, that our system was chaotic, that the immigration system was itself broken,
04:41that asylum cases took too long to adjudicate, and people waiting lawfully to immigrate should be given priority of those who do not.
04:50As President Donald Trump promised, his focus would be on the deportation of violent criminals.
04:57But he also promised mass deportations, and the only way to square that conflict between the very specific and the very broad
05:07was to go back to that original lie that all immigrants are violent criminals who mean us harm.
05:14If you can make the country believe that, you don't have to be targeted in your immigration raids.
05:21You don't have to go through the painstaking work of tracking down people with criminal records
05:26who don't want to be found.
05:28If you believe the lie that all immigrants are violent criminals, then you can do broad immigration sweeps at restaurants,
05:35or on farms, in garment factories, or high school graduations, in random neighborhoods and homes, or at the Home Depot.
05:45Just go out there and arrest illegal aliens, the president's deputy chief of staff, a frustrated Stephen Miller demanded,
05:55after berating department officials for the slow pace of their operations.
06:003,000 arrests a day, the administration insisted on as a new quota.
06:07And gone was any pretense of looking for violent offenders.
06:12And so the indiscriminate raids and the indiscriminate cruelty began to multiply.
06:16People picking up people who show up for immigration appointments, or take the oath of citizenship, or to take that oath only to deport them.
06:28Separating fathers from their sons and daughters, mothers from their children, husbands from their wives.
06:34A farm worker who worked in the fields for decades, hard work, back-breaking work, work in the heat and the cold,
06:41work during a deadly pandemic when others stayed home.
06:44Work that most U.S. citizens do not want to do, and will not do.
06:49Chased through the fields that they harvested, to be taken away from their families.
06:54A mother chased down the street by hooded ICE agents, away from her terrified and screaming teenage daughter.
07:05Americans did not vote for this.
07:08Do not want this.
07:10And in the midst of this, the American people started to speak out.
07:14At first in small ways, in private conversations after the deportation of their neighbors.
07:20And then in more public ways, at town halls, and in letters to the editor, on social media, and in gatherings at their schools.
07:28And then as the raids increased in their scope, and the scope of their cruelty, by taking to the streets as is our God-given right,
07:37and also a right given by our Constitution.
07:41Some of those protests have taken place in Los Angeles.
07:45Where Angelenos gathered to speak out against these actions, against the separation of families,
07:52and the injury to our communities, and our economy.
07:56And in the midst of these protests, some number of agitators were attracted by the conflict,
08:02and saw it as an opportunity to vandalize, assault law enforcement, and engage in other reprehensible conduct.
08:10Like moths to a flame, every city has these miscreants, and so does Los Angeles.
08:16They care not about immigration policy, or immigrants or migrants who are affected.
08:21And our state and local law enforcement are more than capable of dealing with them, and they did.
08:27But amidst the failure of his immigration policies and the backlash, Donald Trump saw an opportunity.
08:34His economic policy was in tatters.
08:37His tariff wars were not improving our trade with other nations,
08:41and instead were prompting the boycott of American goods by close allies like Canada,
08:46and causing layoffs at American ports, higher prices at Target and Walmart and elsewhere.
08:52He had to fend off Amazon plans to include a line item for the Trump tariff tax on each transaction,
09:01which would have made it even more obvious to the American people,
09:04that he was betraying the central promise of his campaign to bring prices down when they are going up.
09:14And his big, beautiful bill was in trouble.
09:18Over a big, ugly price tag, far from reducing the debtor deficit, the bill was revealed to cost taxpayers a whopping $2.4 trillion added to the national debt.
09:30He was borrowing the money from our kids and our grandkids to fund a tax cut for himself and his rich friends.
09:38Even the world's richest man, and heretofore the president's biggest benefactor, Elon Musk, called the bill a disgusting abomination,
09:48and made it clear that Republicans should be ashamed of voting for it.
09:52And the opportunity Donald Trump saw in all this failure was this.
09:59Call in a distraction. Call in the troops. Call in the Marines.
10:03Not to save a city, but to save himself from drowning in failure.
10:08And so he did.
10:104,000 troops from California's National Guard and 700 from the Marines.
10:15And the reaction in Los Angeles, of course, was the one that he desired.
10:19Escalation, not de-escalation.
10:22More conflict, not less.
10:24More chaos, and the kind of chaos he thrives on.
10:27The kind of chaos where the insurrectionist-cum-president,
10:31the man who, on his first day, pardoned hundreds of criminals who beat police officers,
10:36could somehow try to reclaim the mantle of a law and order president.
10:42It has not worked. It will not work.
10:46Americans have a long memory and will not soon forget the images of January 6th,
10:51when the president sat calmly in the White House dining room,
10:55dining on burgers and fries while our Capitol Police were under assault.
10:59And the same man who called in the Guard to handle a comparatively small number of criminals and vandals in LA
11:07refused to call in the Guard to stop thousands of them from ransacking this Capitol.
11:14The last time a president called in a National Guard over the objection of the governor of a state
11:22was in 1965, when the segregationist governor of Arkansas ignored a ruling of the Supreme Court
11:30and refused to integrate the schools in that state.
11:33Lyndon Johnson did so to avoid violence and to protect the students trying to attend.
11:39Those circumstances could not be more different than today,
11:43when our president has called in the Guard knowing it is more likely to provoke violence than to stop it.
11:50We must reject any thinking of our cities as a battle space.
11:57That our uniformed military is called upon to dominate, a Secretary of Defense once said.
12:03At home, he said, we should use our military only, when requested to do so,
12:09on very rare occasions by state governors.
12:14Those are the words of Donald Trump's Secretary of Defense.
12:18Not Pete Hegseth, of course.
12:20Not the Fox News version of a defense secretary.
12:23And not the Trump defense secretary before him or the one before that.
12:28No, those were the words of the first Trump defense secretary, James Mattis.
12:32Perhaps the only Trump cabinet member in his first term or the present term
12:37to leave his office with a stronger reputation than before he arrived.
12:42Militarizing our response, Mattis said, sets up a conflict, a false conflict, between the military and civilian society.
12:51It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform,
12:57and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part.
13:04Keeping public order, he said, rests with civilian state and local leaders who best understand their communities and are answerable to them.
13:16Now, in California, we love our National Guard.
13:20We revere them as we do the Marines.
13:23The Guard is always there when we need them.
13:26During fires and floods, after devastating earthquakes, they serve us at home and abroad.
13:33Always protecting our interests, our lives, our homes, and our freedom.
13:39There is a bond between us, a bond of respect, affection, and trust that must not be broken.
13:47Donald Trump does not understand this.
13:50He cannot understand it any more than he can understand why people choose a life of military service.
13:57The man who once called soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen who fight and die on our nation's behalf, suckers and losers, could not possibly understand.
14:08Nor does he care about misusing them if it suits his personal or political interests as his partisan, disrespectful, and inflammatory speech at Fort Bragg makes clear.
14:23As does his commandeering of the military for a costly parade to celebrate his birthday this weekend.
14:31Now, there is a birthday worth celebrating this weekend, but it is not the President's, and that is the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army, an army that my father was very proud to serve in.
14:45We can and should honor the army, but a celebration of the vanity of a President who does not himself celebrate the military but only his control over it, that is not a cause for celebration.
15:00Our founders understood the need to insulate the military from internal domestic affairs, from the raucous and often divisive nature of the political process dominated by party or faction.
15:13For centuries, too, so has this Congress, prohibiting the use of the military for domestic law enforcement purposes except for narrow, very narrow circumstances of rebellion and insurrection.
15:28This is vital not only for the protection of the country from a man who would abuse the military to become a king, but also to protect the military from the lack of trust that would accompany its subversion to a partisan end.
15:42Our country is approaching its 250th birthday.
15:48It is worth remembering why we chose to separate ourselves from our British masters.
15:54The preamble of the Declaration of Independence is familiar to us all in its poetic recitation of truths that are self-evident.
16:03But what has been lost to us over time were the long list of grievances set out in that document.
16:11Grievances that drove the impetus for revolution.
16:15The history of the present King of Great Britain, it reads, is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations.
16:25This is what our founders wrote, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states.
16:35The declaration provides in its list of grievances, quote, he has obstructed the administration of justice.
16:44He has erected a multitude of new offices and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, they enumerated.
16:55He has made judges dependent on his will alone our founders charged.
17:00For cutting off trade with all parts of the world, they objected.
17:04For depriving us in many cases of the benefits of trial by jury, they declared.
17:09For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses, they cited in words all too prescient for today.
17:18He has kept among us in times of peace standing armies without the consent of our legislatures.
17:25Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us.
17:29He is affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power.
17:35All of these grievances, so vivid at the time of revolution, our revolution, are so vivid today.
17:44And today they can be distilled into a single image.
17:49That of Senator Alex Padilla, on the ground, face to the ground, and in handcuffs.
17:57If you are looking for an image of our democracy in handcuffs, look no further.
18:04America, we have a choice.
18:07We can rededicate ourselves to the vision of our founders.
18:11One born of struggle against autocracy.
18:14One pledged to a form of self-governance that elevated the people over the powerful.
18:20That believed we possessed sufficient virtue to be self-governing.
18:25That we did not need to be governed by a despot.
18:30We can rededicate ourselves to that vision.
18:33Or we can continue to travel down our present path of incivility, of division, of might.
18:39Not making right, but making wrong.
18:42A celebration not of self-governance, but of self-destruction.
18:47I believe in this country.
18:50I believe we are a great country because we have always strived to be a good country.
18:55I believe in this country because of good people like Alex Padilla.
19:00Wonderful people, beautiful people, courageous people, patriotic people.
19:06Alex Padilla's story is the story of all of us.
19:12The story of what's possible in this country.
19:15He is a good and decent man.
19:18He is a great and capable senator.
19:23He deserved better than what he got in that federal building in Los Angeles.
19:30The American people deserve better than what he got in the federal building in Los Angeles.
19:38Let us remember ourselves.
19:42Let us remember who we are.
19:46We are the country of Jefferson and of Lincoln and of Washington.
19:53We are the country of John Lewis and we are the country of giants.
20:03We stand on their shoulders.
20:05We owe our life, our liberty, the opportunity to pursue happiness to their brilliant legacy.
20:12We have come to the rescue and liberation of other worlds, of other parts of this globe.
20:19We have fought for democracy.
20:21We have championed democracy and human rights.
20:25We believed in treating others as we would treat ourselves.
20:30This is who we are.
20:32Alex Padilla faced down in a federal building, forced to the ground by agents of the Secretary of Homeland Security.
20:43This is not who we are.
20:45This is not who we are.
20:50I can't help but think of the words of my late and wonderful colleague, Elijah Cummings.
20:57Because they have always been such a potent reminder.
20:59We are better than this.
21:02We are better than this.
21:05We are not a country that sends the Marines into a city, not to restore order but to create disorder.
21:14We are a better country than that.
21:18We are not a country that needs to have a parade honoring our president, to showcase our military might on his birthday.
21:30We are a better country than this.
21:33There have been giants who have served in our military.
21:42There have been giants that have served in this body.
21:46Great people.
21:48Come from all different backgrounds.
21:55And the strength of this country is that that is still so possible.
22:02You can come from any beginning and end up here.
22:09And we have been a country that has welcomed people from around the world because we have understood.
22:15They bring their genius and their work ethic and their striving with them.
22:22And it has lifted our country forward.
22:28We have that beautiful Statue of Liberty not because we disdain immigrants.
22:32Not because we view them as a threat.
22:35But because we celebrate what they have brought to this country.
22:39And I think in the last several years we have forgotten who we are.
22:47And every now and then we just need to step back from the abyss and remind ourselves of where we came from.
22:59And that in this greatest nation on earth what is possible.
23:09I didn't serve with Alex Padilla in the state legislature and didn't get to serve with him or really get to know him well until I came to this body.
23:18And I told my colleagues when I got here, you're all wonderful people, but nobody, nobody did better than I did in who I got as my seatmate.
23:32And I mean that with all my heart.
23:35He is a good and genuine and decent and capable and brilliant man.
23:40I'll never forget that image I saw today.
23:49Because to me it's the image of what's best in this country being brought to the ground.
23:58And so, Mr. President, I ask every member of this body to think about the legacy we've been charged with protecting.
24:14And what we're going to do from this day forward to make sure that this incredible experiment in self-governance continues.
24:23And that we never see an act like we saw two hours ago take place again in the United States of America.
24:31Mr. President, I yield back.
24:33I get to see.
24:35Mr. Prime Minister, I yield back.
24:37I yield back.
24:47Mr. Prime Minister.
24:49I thank you, Mr. President.
24:51I yield back.
24:52I yield back.
24:54I yield back.
24:55I yield back.
25:00I yield back.
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