Migrants, ICE raids dominate governor forums

Candidates for Newsom's job point records, roots as the race comes into focus.

- BY SEEMA MEHTA AND DAKOTA SMITH

CHRISTINA HOUSE Los Angeles Times CANDIDATES listen to a question from a union worker as they address the audience of some 250 people. About 8,000 watched online.

Just days after the fatal shooting of a Minnesota woman by a federal immigration agent, the Trump administration's immigration policy was a top focus of California gubernatorial candidates at two forums Saturday in Southern California.

The death of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, inflamed the nation's deep political divide and led to widespread protests in Los Angeles and across the country about President Trump's combative immigration policies.

Former Assembly Majority Leader Ian Calderon, speaking at a labor forum featuring Democratic candidates in Los Angeles, said that federal agents aren't above the law.

"You come into our state and you break one of our f... laws, you're going to be criminally charged. That's it," he said.

Federal officials said the deadly shooting was an act of self-defense.

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Dublin) noted that the president of the labor union that organized the candidate forum, David Huerta, was injured and arrested during the Trump administration's raids on undocumented people in Los Angeles in June.

"Ms. Good should be alive today. David, that could have been you, the way they're conducting themselves," he said to Huerta, who was moderating the event. "You're now lucky if all they did was drag you by the hair or throw you in an unmarked van, or deport a 6year-old U.S. citizen battling stage 4 cancer." Roughly 40 miles south at a separate candidate forum featuring the top two Republicans in the race, GOP candidate and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco said politicians who support "sanctuary state" policies should be voted out of office.

"I wish it was the 1960s, '70s and '80s - we'd take them behind the shed and beat the s― out of them," he said.