California Republicans call it the ‘Stop Nick Shirley Act’. Here’s who it’s supposed to help

Angelica Salas is used to hearing from people who have opinions about her work providing legal aid to immigrants. She knows many people have different views on immigration, including ones that contradict hers. 

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

“I was very shocked. My mother said somebody came looking for you,” said Salas, the executive director for the The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights. “It’s OK if someone decides to picket me if they don’t agree with what I’m doing. … That’s their First Amendment right. It’s very different to go to your mother’s home.”

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

It seemed noncontroversial at first. An expansion of the Safe at Home Program the Legislature approved last year passed with little opposition.

But the new proposal set off a firestorm among some Republican legislators and conservatives who argue that 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 quite literally moving in the opposite direction,” Assemblymember Josh Hoover of Folsom said at a GOP press conference about fraud last week.

The proposal passed the Assembly’s public safety committee this week and is moving through the Legislature.

Expanding Safe at Home program

Originally established to help victims of domestic violence, California’s Safe at Home program helps participants keep their residential addresses confidential and out of public records by providing a substitute mailing address through the California secretary of state. People who live in the same residence are also eligible.

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

Last year, California passed a law expanding it to people who work in gender-affirming health care. Though the bill advanced through the Legislature mostly on a party-line vote, it received bipartisan support in the Assembly’s public safety and judiciary committees, and two Republican assemblymembers voted for it on the floor.

The new measure, Assembly Bill 2624, would widen the eligibility for the Safe at Home Program to “immigration support services provider, employee, or volunteer,” such as Salas and her colleagues.

Stopping independent journalists?

Some GOP assemblymembers, particularly Carl DeMaio of San Diego, have railed against the bill, arguing that it violates constitutional protections for the press, and that it limits journalists’ ability to investigate organizations for fraud, waste and abuse. 

At a privacy committee hearing earlier this month, DeMaio pointed to a provision of the bill that would ban a person from knowingly posting on the internet “the personal information or image of any designated immigration support services provider.”

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

DeMaio dubbed the bill the “Stop Nick Shirley Act,” after the conservative social media influencer whose 2025 video accused child care centers in Minnesota of widespread fraud. His pieces triggered a surge of federal immigration enforcement activity. In February, Shirley visited several Somali-run day care centers in San Diego where he accused owners of running “ghost facilities” with no children present.

DeMaio argues that the bill would curb Shirley and other “citizen journalists” from investigating taxpayer-funded organizations by intimidating them with costly fines and sanctions.

“This is not about protecting people from violence,” said DeMaio. “This is about threatening and intimidating people who are trying to shine a light on bad behavior. If you have nothing to hide, why fear the transparency?”

During a Fox News segment, Caroline Sunshine, President Donald Trump’s former deputy communications director, urged 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 legislators about the proposal, and pointing out that the bill’s author, Democratic Assemblymember Mia Bonta of Oakland, is married to California Attorney General Rob Bonta.

“Instead of going after the fraudsters,” said Shirley in the video, “They’re trying to make it criminal to go after the people committing this fraud.”

Reaction to bill called ‘shocking’

Assemblymember Bonta contends that the bill attempts to prevent the misuse of personal information — especially actions tied to threats or incitement of violence — not to limit lawful speech. But her measure has drawn so much ire from the right that Bonta said she and her staff have received death threats over it.

“I can’t imagine how it must be for immigrant service providers who are doing their job every single day to have to deal with this level of hate,” she said at the public safety hearing.

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

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

“This law has been in existence for 30 years. No one had an issue for 30 years until now, when we wanted to protect immigrant service providers,” Rodriguez said. “That’s the trigger, it’s ‘immigrant,’ and that’s what’s sad for me.”

CalMatters reporter Nadia Lathan contributed to this story.