CA GOP cites Nick Shirley as it fights back against privacy protections

from Lin LaCalMatters

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Angelica Salas is used to hearing people have opinions about her work providing legal aid to immigrants. She knows that many people have different ones views on immigrationincluding those that contradict hers.

But she wasn’t prepared for the moment a stranger showed up at her mother’s house looking for her.

“I was very shocked. My mother said someone was looking for you,” said Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Immigrant Human Rights. “There’s nothing wrong if someone decides to attack me if they don’t agree with what I’m doing… That’s their First Amendment right. It’s a whole different thing to go to your mother’s house.”

Incidents like this — and the threatening phone calls Salas and her staff receive regularly — have led her organization to support a bill that would expand the privacy program that allows certain workers to hide where they live from public databases.

At first it seemed uncontroversial. The expansion of the Safe at Home program, approved last year by the Legislature, was met with little resistance.

But the new proposal has sparked a firestorm among some Republican lawmakers and conservatives who say it is unconstitutional and has the potential to silence independent investigations into government wrongdoing.

“Not only are we unwilling to investigate fraud, but our legislature is literally moving in the opposite direction,” Rep Josh Hoover of Folsom said at a GOP news conference on fraud last week.

The proposal passed the Assembly Public Safety Committee this week and is moving through the Legislature.

Expanding the Safe at Home program.

Originally created to help victims of domestic violence, California’s Safe at Home program helps participants keep their residential addresses private and off the public record by providing an alternate mailing address through the California Secretary of State. People who live in the same dwelling are also eligible.

Since its inception nearly 30 years ago, the eligibility has expanded to include victims of persecution, sexual violence and human trafficking, as well as for people working in reproductive health and during the COVID-19 pandemic, public health officials. To be eligible, individuals must provide evidence that they have received credible threats of violence.

Last year, California passed a law expanding coverage for people who work in gender-affirming health care. Although the bill passed the Legislature mostly on a party line vote, it received bipartisan support in the Assembly Public Safety and Justice Committees, and two Republican members of the House voted for it on the floor.

The new measure, Assembly Bill 2624would expand eligibility for the Safe Home program to an “immigration support service provider, employee or volunteer,” like Salas and her colleagues.

Suspension of independent journalists?

Especially some members of the Republican Party caucus Carl DeMaio of San Diego, opposed the bill, arguing that it violates constitutional protections for the press and that it limits the ability of journalists to investigate organizations for fraud, waste and abuse.

In privacy commission hearing earlier this monthDeMaio pointed to a provision in the bill that would prohibit a person from knowingly posting on the Internet “the personal information or image of any designated immigration support service provider.”

The provision goes on to say “with intent … to cause imminent great bodily harm” and “reasonable fear.”

De Maio dubbed the bill the “Stop Nick Shirley Act” after the conservative social media influencer whose 2025 video accused Minnesota child care centers of widespread fraud. His works sparked a wave of federal immigration enforcement activity. In February, Shirley visited several Somali-run day care centers in San Diego, where he accused the owners of running “ghost facilities” without children.

De Maio argued the bill would restrict Shirley and other “citizen journalists” from investigating taxpayer-funded organizations by threatening them with expensive fines and penalties.

“This is not about protecting people from violence,” DeMaio said. “This is about threats and intimidation of people trying to shine a light on bad behavior. If you have nothing to hide, why are you afraid of transparency?”

During a Fox News segmentCaroline Sunshine, President Donald Trump’s former deputy communications director, called on Gov. Gavin Newsom to denounce the bill, calling it “an authoritarian piece of legislation … designed to silence journalists and cover up the mess that is California.”

Shirley himself posted a 25-minute video confronting Democratic lawmakers about the proposal and pointing out that the bill’s author, Democratic Assemblyman Oh my god of Oakland, is married to California Attorney General Rob Bonta.

“Instead of going after the fraudsters,” Shirley said in the video, “they’re trying to make it a crime to go after the people who are committing this fraud.”

Reaction to bill called ‘shocking’

Assemblyman Bonta argued that the bill is trying to prevent the misuse of personal information — especially actions involving threats or incitement to violence — not to limit lawful speech. But her measure drew so much ire from the right that Bonta said she and her staff received death threats over it.

“I can’t imagine how immigrant service providers who go about their jobs every day have to deal with this level of hate,” she said at the public safety hearing.

The proposal has since been amended to exclude mention of social media, although that language was in the law making gender-affirming health care providers eligible for the privacy program.

Aidy Rodriguez, who testified in support of the bill as a fellow at the Solis Policy Institute at the California Women’s Foundation, said the reaction has been shocking.

“This law has been around for 30 years. No one has had a problem for 30 years now when we wanted to protect immigrant service providers,” Rodriguez said. “That’s why, that’s ‘immigrant’ and that’s what’s sad to me.”

CalMatters reporter Nadia Lathan contributed to this story.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.