California Gov. Gavin Newsom angrily demanded information Sunday about a U.S. Border Patrol raid outside a rally in downtown Los Angeles on Thursday during his rally to gerrymander the state’s congressional seats.
As Breitbart News reported, Newsom held a partisan rally in favor of ignoring the state’s constitutionally mandated nonpartisan district map, to “defend democracy” by eliminating several Republican-held seats.
Outside, the U.S. Border Patrol descended — as Democrats fumed. As the New York Times reported:
More than a dozen Border Patrol agents turned up in downtown Los Angeles on Thursday at a rally and news conference that Gov. Gavin Newsom was holding on congressional redistricting.
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As the governor was preparing to speak inside the Japanese American National Museum in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles, the agents assembled outside, many of them masked and armed, and some wearing tactical helmets and carrying rifles.
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It was not immediately clear whether the agents who arrived on Thursday were patrolling the neighborhood or were part of a targeted operation.
Fox News reported that the agents did, in fact, make an arrest. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem suggested to Fox that federal authorities would not conduct such an operation without actionable intelligence. And Acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli posted on X that the governor’s concerns were overblown.
Democrats could barely contain their anger, including L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, who ditched an event last month on the six-month anniversary of the Palisades Fire to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement:
On Sunday, Newsom’s office issued a Freedom of Information Act demand for information about the use of Border Patrol agents, in his words, against “a fair electoral process” — i.e. a partisan gerrymandering rally:
On August 14, as Governor Newsom and other California elected leaders announced the Election Rigging Response Act to counter President Trump’s attempt to rig the mid-term elections, dozens of armed and masked U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents descended upon the Japanese American National Museum in Downtown Los Angeles. This attempt to intimidate the people of California from defending a fair electoral process was a grotesque use of federal government resources for political grandstanding.
Newsom’s letter also demands the administration furnish any communications it may have had with Fox News — a request that almost certainly runs afoul of the First Amendment’s protection of press freedom.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
