Point man

In the early 1990s, Fabian Núñez and Kevin de León once found themselves spending the night sleeping on the floor of a high school gym along with several busloads of immigrants. They were traveling from Los Angeles to Sacramento to lobby for more money for a grant program that taught English as a second language and provided other services to immigrants seeking to naturalize.

The two community organizers were in their mid-20s and itching for new experiences. Núñez, who had grown up in a poor home, one of 12 siblings, had studied at UC San Diego in the late 1980s before taking a break from academia. He was now, after a period doing odd jobs, starting a stint as an organizer with the One Stop Immigration and Education Center, a Los Angeles-based group that helped immigrants prepare for the citizenship application process.

De León, who had gone to UC Santa Barbara, had also taken a break from his studies and, now, like his friend, was working at One Stop.

A few years earlier, in 1986, Republican President Ronald Reagan had signed a sweeping immigration reform bill, granting amnesty to some 3 million undocumented residents and creating a pathway to citizenship for these men and women. One of the requirements was that they learn English.

At the time of de León and Núñez’s trip to Sacramento, California was experiencing a bitter anti-immigrant political moment, and voters were gearing up to pass Proposition 187, a ballot measure that was designed to deny the undocumented access to all public services, including schools.

Republican Gov. Pete Wilson was planning to run for a second term in 1994, de León remembers, and was hard at work scapegoating immigrants “to help drive him to re-election.” For a young, somewhat idealistic activist, it was a sobering experience. “You had politicians scapegoating and pitting one group against another.”

The trip to Sacramento took a fateful turn when de León and Núñez ran into Willie Brown, then the speaker of the California Assembly, in the halls of the Capitol building. They told the politician why they were in town, and he invited them into his office to discuss immigrants’ rights and resources.

The young men were impressed. After the meeting, de León turned to his friend and, Núñez asserts, said “Wow! Look at this place, this Capitol, where they make all these decisions. Where we live we can’t make these decisions.”

It was an encounter that would profoundly shape both men’s lives—and ultimately place de León at the center of an historic conflict that he didn’t create but isn’t shying away from.

Núñez and de León had known each other since their high school days in San Diego. Both came from hardscrabble backgrounds, and both were raised by single mothers who picked up housecleaning and other work to keep their families afloat. Both also were involved in politics from a young age.

While de León admits he wasn’t a particularly good student, he had been vocal, as a teenager, in his opposition to America’s dirty wars in Latin America. And both youths were deeply into sports, playing basketball, baseball and, especially, track, a sport in which they competed against each other in the 400- and 800-meter races at the city championships.

As a kid, de León bounced around, from one low-end rental unit in the Logan Heights area of town to the next. He recalls that in one of the apartments, people were sleeping in the bathroom. At one point, his mother had to house the family—Kevin, his two half-sisters, some aunts and the kids’ grandmother—in a basement, with padlocked doors entering into walled-off areas that served as makeshift bedrooms. The toilet and shower were in a small building off to the side of the bigger house. The kitchen, too, was separate from the apartment they lived in.

What struck Núñez, when he came around to visit, was the water leaking into his friend’s flat from the floor above. “Someone was taking a shower, and the water was dripping in, and he had to get a bucket,” Núñez recalls. “He’s had a taste of what it’s like to be poor.”

When they were teenagers, Núñez and de León both worked as dishwashers in neighborhood restaurants, spending what little money they saved on trips to ball games and occasional journeys south of the border, where, says Núñez, once in a blue moon they treated themselves to lobsters in the restaurants of Ensenada.

A generation later, Núñez is a Sacramento-based consultant, having spent several years as speaker of the Assembly. De León, now 50, served four years in the Assembly and then moved over to the state Senate, where he became a protégé of Democratic Sen. Darrell Steinberg (whom he calls “The Big D”). In 2014, Steinberg termed out and de León succeeded him as Senate president pro tempore, or pro tem, the highest-ranking member of the upper house.

As a result, de León is one of the most important politicians in a state that has done a political U-turn since the dog days of the early 1990s, not least because of the work of a generation of activists like himself in bringing Latino voters into the political process. Today the state Legislature is firmly under Democratic control and is positioning itself as the focal point of progressive resistance to all things Trump.

De León continues to be a fan of Sacramento. He loves the greenery, he says, the trees, and the diversity of the populace. He enjoys going to see movies at Tower Theater and jogging in Land Park. And, of course, he likes the fact that his old friends have also made the city their home away from home.

He and Núñez get together frequently, often at Núñez’s condo in Fair Oaks, where his wife cooks for de León, or they head out for a restaurant meal at Andy Nguyen’s or Jamie’s Broadway Grille, a little Irish restaurant on the western end of Broadway. Sometimes they are joined by another old friend from their Southern California youth, state Sen. Ricardo Lara, who has recently been pushing for California to adopt a single-payer health-care system.

The three men also go to the Academy Training and Performance Center gym, on F Street, early mornings to work out together. Lara and Núñez have been trying, so far without success, to convince their friend to enroll with them in spin classes. They rib him, gently, that perhaps his legs are no longer strong enough for such strenuous exercise.

But if de León's gym legs aren't quite what they used to be, his political legs are sturdier than ever. His office is peopled by a strong, disciplined staff who know how to close political deals and bring legislation to fruition.

The pro tem has come into his own at a critical moment in the country’s history. On one issue after the next, de León has staked out a position intended to thwart President Donald Trump’s signature policies.

He has pushed his colleagues to pass legislation dramatically limiting state law enforcement’s cooperation with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. (On a related note, he recently went public with the fact that his mother—who died of cancer in the early 1990s—was herself originally an undocumented immigrant.) He also has moved to shore up the state’s already cutting-edge environmental regulations and climate change policies. He has put the state’s muscle behind increasing the minimum wage and protecting expanded access to health care. De León has promised to push legislation requiring that Californians vote on a referendum before any work on a U.S.-Mexico border wall begins on California land. And he has spoken out forcefully against Trump’s attempts to limit the entry of Muslims and refugees into the country.

Those bills—on clean energy, on creating mechanisms to help low-income Californians save for retirement, on providing protections to immigrants, on turning all of California into a sanctuary state—are rolling out of his second floor office in the Capitol at a fast clip these days. There is a sense of urgency to de León’s politics, a sense that without action to stem the Trumpian tide, bad things will happen, and happen at speed.

In his office foyer is a prominently displayed poster commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Japanese internment during World War II. It speaks to something the pro tem feels strongly about: the dangers of using the might of the government to go after vulnerable minorities. That the country elected a man whom he considers to be a bigot as president rattles the usually smooth senator to no end.

“Just the threat Trump represents to many hard-working families is extremely unsettling,” he says.

The absurdity of a billionaire racist masquerading as a friend of the working-man is personal for de León. After all, he grew up firmly on the wrong side of the tracks, poor enough that he’d never had a birthday party as a kid—never got to wallop piñatas and watch the candies showering down. That was something put off until he was in his 40s, when his friend Lara heard that he’d never had a birthday party and decided to throw him a surprise one, piñatas, barbeque and all.

De León knows the real-life stories behind the stereotypes that Trump likes beating up on. “I know Kevin as the person who still feels vulnerable,” says Lara. “He didn’t have that proper upbringing. His mom died when he was young; he didn’t know his dad. Where do we fit in the broader society? We are the children of immigrants who weren’t supposed to succeed.”

Since his January 20 inauguration, the president has snarled about federally “defunding” cities and states that oppose his agenda by, for example, declaring themselves “sanctuary” spaces for the undocumented. He has called California “out of control” and has explicitly threatened to use federal dollars as a “weapon” intended to get the Golden State to bend to his political will.

At the same time, Republicans in Congress and Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, are looking for ways to neutralize California’s strong environmental regulations. Despite the recent defeat of Paul Ryan’s health-care legislation, congressional Republicans still have the Affordable Care Act squarely in their sights—and no state stands to lose more from its rollback than California, which has seen roughly 5 million residents gain health coverage since 2010.

Last but not least, the federal Labor Department is now controlled by people who oppose an increased minimum wage and are deeply suspicious of rigorous workplace safety and other regulations—all of which California, which is moving toward a $15-per-hour minimum wage, has embraced wholeheartedly in recent years.

As a result, de León, Rendon, Attorney General Xavier Becerra and Gov. Jerry Brown have become an outspoken quartet in opposition to Trump’s attempt to remake the nation’s politics and priorities, and in support of protecting California from whatever vindictive paybacks Trump may attempt. “The greatest threat to our state is the incoming head of state,” de León charged during Becerra’s confirmation hearings, a couple days before Trump’s inauguration. He called on Becerra to use his platform to aggressively take on “an administration that doesn’t know about the rule of law or care for it. The task at hand is momentous.”

It is also daunting at times. The state’s political leaders are all too aware that they are walking a tightrope—and that a man of Trump’s temperament is entirely capable of using his power to go after and punish those individuals and regions he regards as his enemies. Their best defense, they have concluded, is to play hardball—to make Trump’s team all too aware that California’s economy is too large to play around with, and that attacks aimed at undermining the state will ultimately serve as a serious drag on the country as a whole.

And so the state’s political leaders have decided to push back as hard as they can. They are continuing to work to bring the state’s large undocumented population out of the shadows by, for example, looking at ways to expand health care access and legal representation, even as Trump’s team unleashes ICE deportation squads on immigrant communities in L.A. and elsewhere.

“There is,” said de León at the Becerra hearings, “a lot of angst, a lot of panic, a lot of frightened families who don’t know what’s going to happen.” His legislators would, he promised, work “incredibly hard” to protect these migrants. So, too, they would work to protect the state’s gold-bar environmental standards even as a Pruitt-led EPA scrambled to unravel federal protections.

De León, who represents the 24th District in downtown and East Los Angeles, isn’t thinking small. Sitting in his large Capitol office, with its baseball paraphernalia on shelves and walls, he’s immaculately dressed in a dark suit and pressed shirt, his dark hair parted to one side, and his right wrist adorned with a brown bead bracelet. He wants, he explains, to “move forward policies I really do believe truly improve the human condition. For example, SB 350, my clean-energy bill—we have created real jobs that are tangible and verifiable.”

Because of this rolling set of political battles, Sacramento has started to come out from under the shadow of more internationally recognized California cities. There's an air of resistance in the city these days—as seen in the vast crowds that flooded the center of the city for the Women's March on January 21; seen in the volatile March 28 immigration forum where de León cross-examined Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones and interim ICE Director Thomas D. Homan over their enforcement practices; and witnessed on a near-daily basis in hearings and speeches at the Capitol, where the Democrats are using their super-majority to push through some of the country's most progressive policies.

Because of his position, de León has his hands in all of it.

“It puts Kevin right at the pinnacle of leading the opposition to this Trump regime,” Lara argues. “And being able not only to defend our American constitutional values, but also forging a California Legislature that’s not going to allow this one election to define who we are.”

For de León’s predecessor, the wrong moment has found the right man.

“I’m happy to see Kevin having this opportunity during this time,” says Steinberg, now Sacramento’s mayor, as he sits in his City Hall office eating Chinese take-out. “His own history and his own path, becoming pro tem of the Senate after growing up with a lot of challenges and obstacles, is really what the broader debate is about. Are we going to have a politics of hope or of fear? You don’t choose the time; the time chooses you.”

As he prepared to board a plane to participate in L.A.’s Earth Day march for science last week, de León reflected on the road ahead, miles away from where he started as a poor kid in a leaky tenement. The Senate leader says that he is more optimistic now than he was in those first dark days after Trump’s election.

“We are resisting policies that undermine our progressive values as a state. The whole world identifies with California in this struggle,” he averred, three months to the day after Trump’s inauguration. “I know we’re doing the right thing. It’s awesome to see civic action in real time.”

Then he flew back to where it all started, to continue the fight.