About a year ago, California Gov. Gavin Newsom was poised to deliver remarks in Los Angeles about redistricting plans when the Democratic governor confronted something unexpected: Federal immigration agents suddenly showed up outside the venue.
At the time, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said that the agents were “focused on enforcing the law, not on [Newsom].”
We now know that wasn’t true.
MS NOW reviewed new court filings that reveal what actually happened: DHS agents testified under oath that the raid on the governor’s press conference was “purely political” and intended as a “political stunt” to target the California Democrat.
A Homeland Security Investigations agent specifically texted another HSI agent to complain that Border Patrol “essentially raided” the Newsom event.
“We got pulled off the [Home Depot] and car wash to run this stunt,” the agent wrote. “We’re told to assist with targeted enforcement. … That is not target enforcement.” The agent added, “That was just a political agenda.”
The Daily Beast, which was first to highlight the court filings, further reported:
Hundreds of explosive court documents have blown the lid off federal immigration operations in Los Angeles, exposing a chaotic mess of random street stops, casual racial slurs, and rogue officers terrified they were being forced to break the law.
The exhibits were included in a motion for a preliminary injunction filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Public Counsel, and other groups and private attorneys seeking to bar an “ongoing campaign of suspicionless and discriminatory detentive stops” in the Central District of California.
If you’re thinking there have been other examples lately of the Trump administration admitting to improper political motivations in court filings, it’s not your imagination.
Asked about the revelations, a DHS spokesperson told The Los Angeles Times that federal immigration agents “are focused on protecting the American people — not entertaining performative outrage.”
Of course, if that were true, agents wouldn’t have raided Newsom’s press conference in the first place.
Indeed, I’m struck by the degree to which these revelations reflect a fundamentally corrupted DHS. Imagine what the reaction would have been if — hypothetically — the department under then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas had deployed armed federal agents to disrupt a Republican governor’s press conference as part of a “political stunt,” and then lied about it.
How apoplectic would GOP members of Congress and conservative media outlets be?
In 2024, Mayorkas became the only sitting Cabinet secretary in American history to be impeached, though Republicans struggled to explain why. More than two years later, amid evidence of actual abuses, it’s hard not to wonder whether anyone from the Trump administration will face anything like accountability.
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