“We are a democracy, but we can lose that democracy,” a mournful Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) said today at the Capital mere minutes after Senator Alex Padilla was stunningly dragged out of a press conference in West LA by Sec. Kristi Noem, handcuffed and detained. “This is so wrong, this is so wrong.”
The Senator’s office says the senior Senator from the state of California and son of Mexican immigrants is no longer being detained, but he has not emerged from the federal building. DHS have said that the Secret Service reacted, or over reacted, because they thought he was an “attacker” who seemed to “lunge at Noem – a statement that makes no sense with the level of security required to even get inside a federal building.
With tensions sky high in LA and thousands of National Guard and US. Marines deployed, DHS says the Secretary and the Senator had a 15-minute meeting afterwards. That has not been independently confirmed, but Senator Padilla is expected to speak soon.
The widely condemned reaction by federal agents as the Senator was seeking to ask Trump loyalist Noem questions comes as massive and harsh ICE raids have been unleashed all over California and the nation in the last week.
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