LOS ANGELES — Vice President JD Vance on Friday accused California Gov. 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 U.S. Sen. 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 U.S.'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.