Kamala Harris’ Senate replacement has picked his issue. How Alex Padilla is spending his time
In an ornamental glass case on the left side of California Sen. Alex Padilla’s office sits a framed picture of his parents meeting President Joe Biden in Los Angeles in 2014.
Yes, Padilla says, he had the chance to introduce his parents to the then-vice president of the United States.
“But the other thing is, I introduced the vice president to my parents,” he said in an interview with The Sacramento Bee.
Over the past 10 months, Padilla has emerged as a stalwart voice on immigration in the United States Senate where he represents a state where Latinos are the largest ethnic group. He is California’s first Latino U.S. Senator, picked by Gov. Gavin Newsom to replace vice president Kamala Harris when she assumed that role.
He became chairman of the subcommittee on immigration upon arrival, an uncommon level of appointment for freshmen senators, and is the first Latino to lead it.
His first bill was to provide a pathway to citizenship for essential workers, such as farm workers and grocery-store employees, many of whom do not have immigration documentation.
“The Department of Homeland Security under Donald Trump recognized certain sectors as – quote, unquote – ‘essential’: Essential for the nation’s security and essential for the nation’s supply chain,” Padilla said. “And to think that there’s more than five million undocumented immigrants considered essential by the federal government, that should be an acknowledgment that they deserve better than the conditions they have been living in and working in today.”
Immigration is a political football tossed between Republicans and Democrats for decades. While there has been bipartisan support for some initiatives, most have remained in deadlock as parties shift priorities.
Rhetoric used by former President Donald Trump’s administration as he fought to build a border wall with Mexico, among other means to bar people from moving to the country, heightened anti-immigrant sentiment, advocates said.
While immigration rights advocates have said Padilla is a “champion” for reform, they also said change is difficult to pass when it requires a two-thirds majority in a Senate split evenly between Democrats and Republicans.
“It’s hard to see that compromised pathway when one party is so almost entirely against it,” said Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, in an interview with The Sacramento Bee.
Saenz mentioned that the Bush family and John McCain were both vocally open to immigration reform, but their and similar voices have since silenced. “They’ve not been succeeded by others who are proactively putting out a different perspective,” Saenz said.
Padilla in the Senate
Padilla had been relatively quiet on other issues, more typical of a senator who was selected rather than elected. He has grown more vocal on eliminating the filibuster, protecting voting rights and addressing wildfire issues, among other values pushed by Democrats.
He moved to insert immigration reform into the sweeping multi-trillion-dollar tax and spending bill. Democrats have been packing the measure with social reforms that might not win Republican approval, as the bill requires only a simple majority in the 50-50 Senate.
The senate parliamentarian, who advises on the chamber’s procedures, told senators to remove the immigration language. Padilla and other senators have since worked to amend it in an effort to pass some protections.
The White House, in a memo detailing its framework for the budget bill last month, said the measure would allocate $100 million to fixing the “broken” immigration system and provide additional legal support for migrants and asylum seekers.
Padilla and other members of Congress announced a bill on Friday that would heighten oversight, accountability and training for Border Patrol officers.
Last month, Padilla introduced another bill for people seeking citizenship who have had criminal convictions “expunged, vacated or pardoned” by their sentencing court. The bill asks that those prior convictions not sway naturalization opportunities or their ability to remain in the U.S.
He also hopes that people who are living in the U.S. with protections under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, better known as DACA, can be put on similar pathways to citizenship.
California and Padilla are both strong defenders of DACA, recently against the former president’s efforts to rescind it. California and other states won a lawsuit over Trump’s attempt to void DACA protections.
About 223,000 DACA recipients live in California, the Public Policy Institute of California estimates.
Padilla’s California offices
He served as California’s secretary of state since 2015 and, during that time, encouraged people to seek citizenship to exercise their right to vote.
His ascension to the Senate was fast-tracked. Padilla, 48, was the youngest person and first Latino to serve on the Los Angeles City Council, and ended up heading it. He served as acting mayor of LA for a few days in the wake of the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
In 2006, he became a state senator before running to become California’s secretary of state.
Padilla, the son of Mexican immigrants who met and married in Los Angeles, recalls waiting in line with his older sister and younger brother as his parents renewed their green cards every few years.
“It’s what I thought was normal, it’s just that was life for us — until Proposition 187,” he said.
With a freshly-minted engineering degree from a top-tier university, Padilla came home in 1994 to advocate against the ballot initiative that would have blocked undocumented immigrants from seeking health care in most circumstances. (The measure passed, but a federal court effectively struck it down before it could be enforced.)
It kick-started his career in politics, one pathway his father had hoped for since they had been renewing those green cards.
“Son, when you grow up, I want you to work with your mind and not with your back,” his father would say to him in Spanish.
“There’s a lot of honor in manual labor. But that was his way of saying if you wanted to be better for us, the way to achieve that was to get a good education,” Padilla said.
He did. With a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This story was originally published November 8, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Kamala Harris’ Senate replacement has picked his issue. How Alex Padilla is spending his time."
