By The Navarro Report Staff
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation Aug. 22 extending California’s decades-old Safe at Home address confidentiality program to a new group: attorneys, counselors, nonprofit staff, and volunteers who provide services to immigrants. Assembly Bill 2624, authored by Assemblymember Mia Bonta (D-Oakland) and titled the Privacy for Immigration Support Services Providers Act, allows qualifying workers to keep their home addresses out of public records starting Oct. 1, 2027 — a date that notably falls after Newsom leaves office under term limits.
Established in 1998, Safe at Home originally shielded survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, human trafficking, and elder abuse by providing a substitute mailing address. It has since expanded to cover reproductive health and gender-affirming care providers. AB 2624 extends that same legal framework to immigration service workers, whom Bonta says are facing an escalating wave of targeted harassment.
“Our immigrant service providers are living in fear because of extremists looking to demonize the work that they do and the populations they serve,” Bonta said. Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, testified before the Assembly Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee that she had personally been doxed. “It happened to me and happened to a family member. They were looking for me and ended up in my mother’s home,” Salas said, adding that colleagues at her own organization and others have faced threats and unwanted visits to their homes.
Republican lawmakers mounted fierce opposition. State Sen. Tony Strickland (R-Huntington Beach) warned the measure could violate the First Amendment and chill investigative journalism and public accountability efforts. Assemblyman Carl DeMaio went further, branding it the “Stop Nick Shirley Act” — a reference to a conservative content creator whose undercover investigations into immigration service organizations have drawn national attention. Critics argue the law could make it harder to expose fraud or misconduct at nonprofits that fall under its protection, since reporters and investigators would lose access to home-address records they might otherwise use to verify claims or locate sources.
Bonta rejected the framing that the bill pits privacy against press freedom. “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,” she said. “Those two freedoms were never in tension.”
The bill arrives alongside a broader package of immigrant-protection measures moving through Sacramento this session. State Sen. María Elena Durazo (D-Los Angeles) saw Newsom sign eleven of her bills, including SB 580, the Strengthening Immigrant Protection Response Guides Act, and SB 635, the Street Vendor Protection Act, which shields personal information collected during local permitting processes from being turned over to federal immigration enforcement. Taken together, the measures reflect a deliberate legislative strategy: using state privacy and records law to insulate immigrant communities and the people who serve them from both harassment and federal enforcement reach, at a moment when the Trump administration has significantly escalated immigration enforcement nationwide.
For San Diego’s substantial immigrant-services sector — legal aid clinics, resettlement nonprofits, binational advocacy groups — AB 2624 offers a concrete new protection once it takes effect, though its 2027 start date means current threats go unaddressed by this specific tool for now. The larger question the law raises, one likely to recur as California continues layering privacy protections onto politically contested populations, is where the line falls between shielding vulnerable workers from genuine intimidation and limiting the public’s and press’s ability to scrutinize how taxpayer and donor-funded immigration services actually operate. That tension, unresolved in Sacramento, will likely be tested in court before it is tested in practice.
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