Newsom signs bill shielding immigrant aid workers' home addresses

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Saturday signed legislation that allows workers and volunteers at organizations that aid immigrants to shield their home addresses from public records, and makes it illegal to post their personal information online with the intent to incite violence against them.

Assembly Bill 2624, by Assemblymember Mia Bonta (D-Alameda), creates a state address confidentiality program for people who provide legal, humanitarian and other services to immigrants and people who have faced threats, harassment or violence because of that work. Applicants will have to register with the secretary of state, document a threat within the past year and receive a substitute address that government agencies must generally accept.

Newsom signed the bill without comment. It was one of five that his office said he signed into law the same day, including those on the State Bar’s use of artificial intelligence, child custody mediation, online posting of local government audits, and health instruction in schools.

The immigrant aid worker-related law covers providers, employees and volunteers at nonprofit offices, community legal clinics, law offices and health facilities. It also outlaws posting a participant’s personal information or image online with the specific intent to incite imminent great bodily harm against them, or to threaten them into reasonable fear for their safety.

Assemblymember Carl DeMaio (R-San Diego) had dubbed it the “Stop Nick Shirley Act,” referring to a right-wing online influencer who has posted videos alleging problems at Somali-run child-care centers in Minnesota and at hospices in the Los Angeles area. DeMaio said the bill would restrict citizen journalists.

Speaking to The Times in May, Carolyn Iodice of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression said similar laws had been turned against journalists. She pointed to a New Jersey law that officials invoked to bar the editor of a local news outlet from publishing a police official’s home address. “It was obviously newsworthy, but this officer was able to wield the law against this journalist, and that is the kind of thing we are worried about,” she said.

Bonta said the new law responds to a climate of intimidation affecting immigrant aid workers.

“AB 2624 is fundamentally about freedom: the freedom from fear that lets our immigrant service providers do their jobs, and the freedom of the press to do their jobs without ever being conflated with the doxxing this bill actually targets. Those two freedoms were never in tension. Right now, our immigrant service providers are living in fear because of extremists looking to demonize the work that they do and the populations they serve. That is an intolerable consequence of the anti-immigrant rhetoric that exists right now,” Bonta said in a statement.

“I’m proud that, with the signing of this bill, California is rejecting that, even when people try to make us feel that the political cost of supporting immigrant communities is too high,” she said.