NEWSOM signs a controversial bill that allows family members to take care of children if parents are deported

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Governor Gavin Newo signed a bill on Sunday, which will expand the list of family members who can take care of children if their parents are deported, a measure that causes a storm of conservative criticism.

It was 495 It will also prohibit kindergarten providers from collecting information about immigration for a child or their parents and allowing parents to nominate a temporary lawful guardian for their child.

“We want to say that we support our families and their right to keep their private information secure, maintain parental rights and help families prepare for emergencies,” Newsom says in a news message.

This was one of several measures that democrats dominated this year in response to the aggressive deportation repression of the Trump administration in Los Angeles and California. Newsom signed several bills – Prohibition of immigration and customs law enforcement agents (ICE) to wear masks and require schools and hospitals to require varants when agents appear – at a ceremony in Los Angeles last month.

NEWSOM has left Bill 495 indefinitely for weeks, triggering a wave of activism from immigrant rights groups to get their signature to intensive opposition to conservative activists. The governor announced his decision the day before the deadline for signing or vetoing over 800 legislators, which the legislators sent him last month.

The most controversial aspect of the bill refers to a little known, decades, called a declaration of permission of the care. Relatives of a child whose parents are not present and with whom the child lives with may certify that they are his guardians; This designation allows the adult to enroll the child to school, to take the child to the doctor and to agree to receive medical and dental care.

The new law will extend the scope of who can be considered a guardian, passing from the more traditional definitions of relatives to any adult in the family, which is associated with blood, adoptive or “fifth-degree affinity”, which includes people such as powders or cousins. The parents can be canceled The appointment of Guardian, which is a temporary agreement and does not provide arrest to that person.

Defenders said that parents at risk of deportation should be able to choose someone they trust, take care of their children if the ice holds them. Expanding the admissibility of the caregiver form, they noted, gives the parents of immigrants more opportunities, because even if they do not have a close family in the country, they take advantage of strong relationships with family members or informal communities.

The legislation was supported by groups for immigrant rights and children’s defenders, such as the Alliance for the Rights of Children and the First 5 California.

“I introduced this bill so that children do not have to wonder what would happen to them if their parents could not take them from school,” said the author of the bill, assembly Rodriguez Celeste D-arleta, at a recent press conference.

Critics say strangers can get custody

But Republicans, religious law and parents’ activists claim that the bill will endanger the children.

They claimed that this would allow strangers to sign the declaration and ask the child in their care. Hundreds of opponents flocked to Capitol in Sacramento on buses to demonstrate the legislation organized by Pastor Jack Hibs from the chapel of Golgotha ​​Chino, Hils Megaacher, who called it the “most dangerous bill we have ever seen.” Part of the reverse reaction stems from false claims that the bill will allow strangers to receive custody of children who are not related.

Assembly Carl Demo, R-San Diego, described legislation as “The dream of trafficking in people.”

In the email Greg Burton, Vice President of the California Family Council, he asked the fact that parents may not be present when the declaration form was signed.

“What are the parental rights?” He wrote. “These rights are not helpful if anyone else can claim them simply by signing a form.”

In the summer, Rodriguez limited the legislation to exclude “unrelated extended family members”, but that was not enough to extinguish the dispute. The legislation was adopted by party lines.

Compared to a rather progressive legislative body, the governor has often positioned himself as a moderate force on the issues of custody and protection of children who who who who who usually mobilizes Conservative activists and put the California Democrats in defense. In 2023, he vetoed a bill that would force the family court judges to consider parental support for the childhood transition of gender in arrest disputes.

At a press conference last week, where activists called on Newsom to sign the bill, Angélica Salas, CEO of the Los Angeles coalition for immigrant human rights, asked the governor “Not to listen to lies, not to listen to all the other things that is being said of this bill.”

By announcing its decision, Newsom quietly acknowledged the dispute in a press message. He included statements that he said that they were “correcting the record” on the wrong presentations and stated that the new law did not change the fact that parental rights and legal guardianship should be resolved by the family court judges.