WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden had a question.
“Is it true?” Biden asked Sen. Alex Padilla, referencing the roughly 25% of U.S. students in kindergarten through high school who are Latino. Padilla said the question came as he was waiting with the president in a back room at a library in Culver City, California before an event in February.
It was exactly the kind of opening Padilla was hoping to get with the Democratic president. Biden was weighing his reelection campaign, executive actions on immigration and what to do about a southern border that has been marked by historic numbers of illegal crossings during his tenure.
Padilla wanted to make sure Biden also took into account the potential of the country's immigrants. “Mr. President, do you know what I call them, those students?" Padilla recalled saying. “It’s the workforce of tomorrow.”
It was just one of the many times Padilla, who at 52 years old is now the senior senator of California, has taken the opportunity — from face-to-face moments with the president to regular calls with top White House staff and sometimes outspoken criticism — to put his stamp on the Democratic Party's approach to immigration.
The son of Mexican immigrants and first Latino to represent his state in the Senate, Padilla has emerged as a persistent force at a time when Democrats are increasingly focused on border security and the country's posture toward immigrants is uncertain.
Illegal immigration is seen as a growing political crisis for Democrats after authorities both at the border and in cities nationwide have struggled to handle recent surges. The party may also be losing favor with Hispanic voters amid disenchantment with Biden. But Padilla, in a series of interviews with The Associated Press, expressed a deep reserve of optimism about his party's ability to win support both from and for immigrant communities.
“Don’t be afraid, don’t be reluctant to talk about immigration. Lean into it,” Padilla said. “Because number one, it’s the morally right thing to do. Number two, it is key to the strength, the security and the future of our country.”
The senator has tried to anchor his fellow Democrats to that stance even as the politics of immigration grow increasingly toxic. Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has said immigrants who enter the U.S. illegally are “poisoning the blood” of the country and accused Biden of allowing a “bloodbath” at the southern border. Biden, meanwhile, has shifted to the right at times in both the policies and language he is willing to use as illegal border crossings become a vulnerability for his reelection bid.
Such was the case when Biden, during his State of the Union address, entered into an unscripted exchange with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican of Georgia, and referred to a Venezuelan man accused of killing a nursing student in Georgia as an “illegal” — a term anathema to immigration rights advocates.
After the speech, Padilla discussed the moment with Rep. Tony Cárdenas in the apartment they share in Washington. Cárdenas said their conversation turned to how they wanted politicians to avoid labeling migrants as “illegals” because it deprived them of dignity.
Padilla told him he would call the White House.
“He’s is the kind of person who steps in and steps up, and, you know, he’s tactical about it,” Cárdenas said.
It's a difficult role to play, especially as Democrats try to shore up what’s seen as a weakness on border security in the battleground states that will determine control of the White House and Congress.
Even in California, Republicans have been emboldened on immigration as they try to reassert statewide relevance, said Mark Meuser, a lawyer who lost elections against Padilla for the Senate in 2022 and California Secretary of State in 2018. He argued top California Democrats like Padilla “are driving hard towards the extreme edges of their party.”
Padilla has urged the president and fellow Democrats to hold firm to the position that border enforcement measures be paired with reforms for immigrants who are already in the country.
During Senate negotiations earlier this year over border policy, Padilla asserted himself as the leader of congressional opposition from the left.
Padilla, along with four other Democratic-aligned senators, eventually voted against advancing the package, ensuring its failure as Republicans also rejected it.
“He is a lone voice but it is a courageous voice in the Senate,” said Vanessa Cardenas, who leads the immigration advocacy organization America's Voice.
It’s been a quick ascent for Padilla, who is just beginning his fourth year in Congress. Yet for Padilla, it's the very reason he entered politics in the first place.
When he graduated in 1994 with an engineering degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it was a dream fulfilled for his parents — his father a short order cook and his mother a house cleaner. But he was soon drawn into politics as the state’s attention turned to Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot measure that was approved to deny education, health care and other non-emergency services to immigrants who entered the country illegally.
It was branded by supporters as the Save Our State Initiative. Padilla still remembers the ads for the campaign.
“Trying to try to blame a downward economy on the hardest working people that I know was offensive and an outrage,” he said.
Now he sees parallels between California in the 1990s, which approved the ballot measure but then had it invalidated in federal court, and the wider country today: changing demographics, economic uncertainty and political opportunists “scapegoating” immigrants.
Yet it also spurred the state’s Latinos to get involved politically. To Padilla, there's no coincidence that California, the state with the most immigrants, now boasts the nation's largest economy and is a stronghold for Democrats.
FILE - Rep. Tony Cardenas, D-Calif., speaks to members of the media in Washington, April 25, 2022. Cardenas and Rep. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., who have known each other since their earliest days in Los Angeles politics, now form a political odd couple while away from their families in California. "He's is the kind of person who steps in and steps up, and, you know, he's tactical about it," Cardenas. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)
FILE - Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., speaks during a hearing on April 20, 2023, in Washington. Padilla is taking practically every opportunity to put his stamp on the Democratic Party's approach to immigration. The son of Mexican immigrants and the first Latino to represent his state in the Senate, he has emerged as a persistent force at a time when Democrats are increasingly focused on border security and the country's posture toward immigrants is uncertain. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — A New Hampshire man convicted of killing his 5-year-old daughter and moving her corpse around for months before disposing of it was sentenced Thursday to a minimum of 56 years in prison on murder and other changes as relatives of the child called him a monster.
That sentence will be added on to the minimum 32 1/2-year sentence Adam Montgomery, 34, began last year on unrelated gun charges, effectively amounting to a life sentence following his actions in the death of Harmony Montgomery. Police believe she was killed nearly two years before she was reported missing in 2021. Her body was never found.
A prosecutor offered to lessen the sentence for the second-degree murder conviction and other charges if Montgomery “tells us right now” the location of his daughter’s remains. Montgomery, who has maintained his innocence in the death of his daughter, did not speak in the Manchester courtroom. His attorney later called the offer a “stunt” and said Montgomery's silence should not be interpreted as a lack of remorse.
People who knew Harmony Montgomery spoke about the happy, kind child they once knew.
“She had a life worth living, unlike your own," Crystal Sorey, Harmony's mother, read from a statement addressing Adam Montgomery, her hands shaking. “And it bothered you to your core that she was nothing like you and everything like me.”
Sorey added, “I will forever look for her until the end of my days. But I hope that every day and every night here on this earth, you hear nothing but my baby's giggle.”
The parents who adopted Harmony's brother, now 7, spoke on his behalf. “I'm really sad she's an angel. I miss her," they quoted him as saying.
Montgomery did not attend his trial in February. He was ordered by the judge to be in court Thursday after his lawyer asked for him to be excused. Montgomery also had pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree assault and witness tampering. He had admitted to abuse of a corpse and falsifying evidence.
Judge Amy Messer noted that Montgomery had an extensive criminal record that dates back to 2008 and that he had extensive opportunities to change his life.
“Your extreme indifference to the value of human life is seen in so many of your actions,” she said.
Messer said the only way to keep Montgomery from hurting others is to keep him off the streets. “To the extent you seek to rehabilitate yourself, that will have to happen behind the prison walls," she said.
An email seeking comment on the sentence and asking about a possible appeal was sent to Montgomery's lawyer, Caroline Smith.
His estranged wife, Kayla Montgomery, had testified that her family, including her two young sons with Adam Montgomery, had been evicted right before Thanksgiving in 2019 and were living in a car. She said on Dec. 7, Adam Montgomery punched Harmony Montgomery at several stop lights as they drove from a methadone clinic to a fast food restaurant because he was angry that the child was having bathroom accidents in the car.
After that, she said she handed food to the children in the car without checking on Harmony and that the couple later discovered she was dead after the car broke down. She testified that her husband put the body in a duffel bag. She described various places where the girl’s body was hidden, including the trunk of a car, a cooler, a homeless center ceiling vent and the walk-in freezer at her husband’s workplace.
During Adam Montgomery’s trial, his lawyers suggested that Kayla continued to lie to protect herself. They said their client did not kill Harmony, and that Kayla Montgomery was the last person to see the child alive.
Kayla Montgomery testified that she didn’t come forward about the child’s death because she was afraid of her husband. She said Adam Montgomery suspected that she might go to the police, so he began punching her, giving her black eyes, she said. She eventually ran away from him in March 2021.
Kayla Montgomery was recently granted parole. She is expected to be released from prison soon after serving an 18-month sentence. She pleaded guilty to perjury charges related to the investigation into the child’s disappearance and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.
“I will forever have a place in my heart for you,” Kayla Montgomery said in a statement read in court on her behalf. But she talked about how their relationship spiraled out of control after Harmony died. “The last couple of nights after you got arrested for the first time, I was sleeping with a knife because I did not know what you were going to do to me,” she wrote, adding, “I'm so angry and hurt by you.”
Adam Montgomery had custody of the girl. Her mother, who was no longer in a relationship with him, said the last time she saw Harmony was during a video call in April 2019. She eventually went to police, who announced they were looking for the missing child on New Year’s Eve 2021. Adam and Kayla Montgomery told police that Adam had taken his daughter to live with Sorey in Massachusetts.
Harmony Montgomery’s case has exposed weaknesses in child protection systems and provoked calls to prioritize the well-being of children over parents in custody matters. Harmony was moved between the homes of her mother and her foster parents multiple times before Adam Montgomery received custody in 2019 and moved to New Hampshire.
Authorities plan to keep searching for the girl's remains, believed to be along a route Adam Montgomery drove in a rental truck into Massachusetts in March 2020. Prosecutor Benjamin Agati said Thursday that police last went out for a search a couple of weeks ago, but they were not successful.
Blair, right, and Johnathon Bobbitt-Miller, adoptive parents of Harmony Montgomery's biological brother Jamison, address the court during the Adam Montgomery sentencing hearing at Hillsborough Superior Court, Thursday, May 9, 2024, in Manchester N.H. Montgomery was found guilty of second-degree murder earlier in the year in the death of his 5-year-old daughter, Harmony, who police believe was killed nearly two years before she was reported missing in 2021 and whose body was never found. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
Superior Court Judge Amy Messer addresses Adam Montgomery and his defense attorneys during a sentencing hearing at Hillsborough Superior Court, Thursday, May 9, 2024, in Manchester N.H. Montgomery was found guilty of second-degree murder earlier in the year in the death of his 5-year-old daughter, Harmony, who police believe was killed nearly two years before she was reported missing in 2021 and whose body was never found. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, Pool)
Adam Montgomery, center, stands with his attorneys Caroline Smith, left, and James Brooks during his sentencing hearing at Hillsborough Superior Court, Thursday, May 9, 2024, in Manchester N.H. Montgomery was found guilty of second-degree murder earlier in the year in the death of his 5-year-old daughter, Harmony, who police believe was killed nearly two years before she was reported missing in 2021 and whose body was never found. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, Pool)
Adam Montgomery listens during his sentencing hearing at Hillsborough Superior Court, Thursday, May 9, 2024, in Manchester N.H. Montgomery was found guilty of second-degree murder earlier in the year in the death of his 5-year-old daughter, Harmony, who police believe was killed nearly two years before she was reported missing in 2021 and whose body was never found. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, Pool)
Adam Montgomery arrives for his sentencing hearing at Hillsborough Superior Court, Thursday, May 9, 2024, in Manchester N.H. Montgomery was found guilty of second-degree murder earlier in the year in the death of his 5-year-old daughter, Harmony, who police believe was killed nearly two years before she was reported missing in 2021 and whose body was never found. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, Pool)
Crystal Sorey, mother of Harmony Montgomery, addresses the court during Adam Montgomery's sentencing hearing at Hillsborough Superior Court, Thursday, May 9, 2024, in Manchester N.H. Montgomery was found guilty of second-degree murder earlier in the year in the death of his 5-year-old daughter, Harmony, who police believe was killed nearly two years before she was reported missing in 2021 and whose body was never found. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, Pool)
Crystal Sorey, mother of Harmony Montgomery, embraces a member of the gallery after addressing the court during Adam Montgomery's sentencing hearing at Hillsborough Superior Court, Thursday, May 9, 2024, in Manchester N.H. Montgomery was found guilty of second-degree murder earlier in the year in the death of his 5-year-old daughter, Harmony, who police believe was killed nearly two years before she was reported missing in 2021 and whose body was never found. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, Pool)
Adam Montgomery arrives for his sentencing hearing at Hillsborough Superior Court, Thursday, May 9, 2024, in Manchester N.H. Montgomery was found guilty of second-degree murder earlier in the year in the death of his 5-year-old daughter, Harmony, who police believe was killed nearly two years before she was reported missing in 2021 and whose body was never found. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, Pool)
