Vice President JD Vance on Friday, June 20, accused California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass of encouraging violent immigration protests as he used his appearance in Los Angeles to rebut criticism from state and local officials that the Trump administration fueled the unrest by sending in federal officers.
Vance also referred to US Senator Alex Padilla, the state’s first Latino senator, as “Jose Padilla,” a week after the Democrat was forcibly taken to the ground by officers and handcuffed after speaking out during a Los Angeles news conference by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on immigration raids .
“I was hoping Jose Padilla would be here to ask a question,” Vance said, in an apparent reference to the altercation at Noem’s event. “I guess he decided not to show up because there wasn’t a theater. And that’s all it is. They want to be able to go back to their far-left groups and to say, ‘Look, me, I stood up against border enforcement. I stood up against Donald Trump,’” Vance added.
A spokesperson for Padilla, Tess Oswald, noted in a social media post that Padilla and Vance were formerly colleagues in the Senate and said that Vance should know better. “He should be more focused on demilitarizing our city than taking cheap shots,” Oswald said.
Vance’s visit to Los Angeles to tour a multiagency Federal Joint Operations Center and a mobile command center came as demonstrations calmed down in the city and a curfew was lifted this week. That followed over a week of sometimes-violent clashes between protesters and police and outbreaks of vandalism and looting that followed immigration raids across Southern California.
Trump’s dispatching of his top emissary to Los Angeles at a time of turmoil surrounding the Israel-Iran war and the US’s future role in it signals the political importance Trump places on his hard-line immigration policies. Vance echoed the president’s harsh rhetoric toward California Democrats as he sought to blame them for the protests in the city.
“Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass, by treating the city as a sanctuary city, have basically said that this is open season on federal law enforcement,” Vance said after he toured federal immigration enforcement offices. “What happened here was a tragedy,” Vance added. “You had people who were doing the simple job of enforcing the law and they had rioters egged on by the governor and the mayor, making it harder for them to do their job. That is disgraceful. And it is why the president has responded so forcefully.”
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Newsom’s spokesperson Izzy Gardon said in a statement, “The Vice President’s claim is categorically false. The governor has consistently condemned violence and has made his stance clear.” Speaking at City Hall, Bass said Vance was “spewing lies and utter nonsense.” She said hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted by the federal government on a “stunt.” “How dare you say that city officials encourage violence? We kept the peace,” Bass said.
In a statement on X, Newsom responded to Vance’s reference to “Jose Padilla,” saying the comment was no accident. Jose Padilla also is the name of a convicted Al-Qaeda terrorism plotter during President George W. Bush’s administration, who was sentenced to two decades in prison. Padilla was arrested in 2002 at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport during the tense months after the 9/11 attacks and accused of the “dirty bomb” mission. It later emerged through US interrogation of other Al-Qaeda suspects that the “mission” was only a sketchy idea, and those claims never surfaced in the South Florida terrorism case.
Responding to the outrage, Taylor Van Kirk, a spokesperson for Vance, said of the vice president: “He must have mixed up two people who have broken the law.”
