JD Vance, the vice-president, on Friday 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.”
He added: “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.’”
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 multi-agency 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 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.”
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.”
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-Qaida terrorism plotter during George W Bush’s administration, who was sentenced to two decades in prison. Padilla was arrested in 2002 at Chicago O’Hare airport during the tense months after the 9/11 attacks and accused of a “dirty bomb” mission.
It later emerged through US interrogation of other al-Qaida suspects that the “mission” was only a sketchy idea, and those claims never surfaced in the 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.”
Federal immigration authorities have been ramping up arrests across the country to fulfill Trump’s promise of mass deportations.
Todd Lyons, the head of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has defended his tactics against criticism that authorities are being too heavy-handed.
The friction in Los Angeles began on 6 June, when federal agents conducted a series of immigration sweeps in the region that have continued since. Amid the protests and over the objections of state and local officials, Trump ordered the deployment of roughly 4,000 national guard troops and 700 marines to the second-largest US city, home to 3.8 million people.
Trump has said that without the military’s involvement, Los Angeles “would be a crime scene like we haven’t seen in years”.
Newsom has depicted the military intervention as the onset of a much broader effort by Trump to overturn political and cultural norms at the heart of the nation’s democracy.
Earlier Friday, Newsom urged Vance to visit victims of the deadly January wildfires while in southern California and talk with Trump, who earlier this week suggested his feud with the governor might influence his consideration of $40bn in federal wildfire aid for California.
“I hope we get that back on track,” Newsom wrote on X. “We are counting on you, Mr Vice President.”
Vance did not mention either request during his appearance on Friday.
