SACRAMENTO — Workers and volunteers at nonprofits that help immigrants navigate the legal system will eventually be allowed to keep their home addresses out of public records, under a bill Gov. Gavin Newsom signed on Saturday, Aug. 22. Assembly Bill 2624 folds that category of worker into California's Safe at Home program, an address-secrecy system that has covered domestic-violence survivors since 1999 and was later widened to include reproductive- and gender-affirming-care staff.
How the shield is supposed to work
Under the enrolled text of AB 2624, a staffer, volunteer or provider at a qualifying legal clinic, nonprofit office or immigration-focused health facility can apply in person to the California Secretary of State for a government-issued substitute address. To qualify, an applicant must document — through a signed statement from their employer, a sworn personal certification, or a restraining order — that they or their workplace faced threats, harassment or violence connected to the job within the prior year, and must also sit through a mandatory counseling session as part of the application. Once approved, the substitute address lasts four years for paid staff, or six months past a volunteer's final shift, and every state or local agency must use it in place of a person's actual home, school or workplace on public-facing records. None of this can happen yet: the statute tells the Secretary of State's office to begin intake on October 1, 2027, so the program itself won't exist for another thirteen months.
What violating it actually costs — and where some coverage gets ahead of the bill
The law also opens a path to civil lawsuits. Someone who publishes a covered employee's home address, photo or other identifying detail online, specifically meaning to get that person hurt or to make them reasonably afraid for their safety, can be sued for an injunction, court costs, attorney's fees, and damages set at triple the actual harm or $4,000, whichever is larger — figures written directly into the bill's civil-remedies section. A separate clause bans publishing that same kind of information intending for someone else to use it to commit an imminent violent crime, but that clause does not attach any specific dollar fine or confinement term of its own; it simply notes that prosecution can proceed under other existing law.
That gap matters, because several outlets covering the signing, including the Daily Caller, reported a criminal penalty ladder rising from a $10,000 fine with as much as twelve months of incarceration for intent-based postings, up to a $50,000 felony if a post leads to actual injury. Those figures do not appear anywhere in the enacted version of the bill, which was reviewed directly for this story. It's possible such numbers reflect general sentencing defaults elsewhere in California law that prosecutors could invoke once a case is filed, but AB 2624 itself sets no such fine or incarceration schedule. Anyone encountering claims that this law carries a built-in prison sentence should know that specific detail isn't supported by the statute's own language.
The fight over a YouTuber's name
None of this became a national story over the fine print alone. It became a story because Assemblymember Carl DeMaio, R-San Diego, nicknamed the measure the "Stop Nick Shirley Act," after the 23-year-old independent YouTuber whose early-2026 confrontations with Somali-run child care operators in San Diego echoed an earlier investigation of his in Minneapolis. That Minnesota reporting helped trigger a federal probe that eventually produced convictions of 59 people connected to schemes that drained more than a billion taxpayer dollars from a state child-care subsidy program. Local reporters who later scrutinized his California claims found that several of the operators he confronted on camera were never charged with wrongdoing.
Newsom's office insists the bill's naming controversy misreads its purpose. "This law has nothing to do with Nick Shirley," said Diana Crofts-Pelayo, the governor's chief deputy communications director, in comments to the Daily Caller, framing the measure as a response to harassment campaigns rather than an attack on fraud journalism. Bill author Assemblymember Mia Bonta, D-Oakland, has argued a similar point since she introduced the measure in February, saying immigrant-service staff are "living in fear because of extremists."
A staffer's insult adds fuel to the fire
Three days before the signing, the dispute turned personal. Multiple outlets reported that Terry Schanz, chief of staff to Democratic Assemblymember Tina McKinnor, approached Shirley mid-interview outside the Capitol and hurled a crude, sexually degrading insult at him — an exchange caught on camera that drew formal complaints to the Legislature's human-resources office. Critics pointed to the episode as evidence that some of the bill's loudest defenders were more interested in mocking a critic than protecting anyone from genuine harassment.
CHIRLA's backing, and a harder-to-prove accusation
The bill's most visible institutional supporter was the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, the Los Angeles nonprofit known as CHIRLA, whose executive director Angelica Salas praised lawmakers for "standing with the people who stand with immigrant communities." CHIRLA has run know-your-rights trainings and rapid-response legal networks for immigrant families across Southern California for decades — precisely the kind of frontline work AB 2624 is designed to cover.
Some coverage of the signing has tied that CHIRLA connection to accusations that the group helped fuel the destructive Los Angeles unrest that followed federal immigration raids in June 2025. That link remains an accusation rather than an established finding: House Judiciary Republicans opened an inquiry into whether CHIRLA helped finance the disorder, and a separate Senate letter pressed the group on the same question. CHIRLA has denied any role in the violence, with Salas telling one broadcaster that critics were "saying the most vicious lies of who we are and what we do." No formal findings or charges tying the organization to the unrest have been made public.
A First Amendment fight still to come
Critics beyond DeMaio, including national Republican figures, argue the address shield could discourage legitimate reporting on nonprofits accused of misusing public funds, even with an intent-to-incite standard built into the statute. Supporters, Bonta among them, maintain that ordinary journalism remains untouched because both the civil and criminal provisions require proof that a poster meant to enable violence or threats — a bar routine reporting does not come close to meeting.
A law that outlasts its author
Because applications won't open until October 2027, Newsom — barred by term limits from seeking another term — will leave office before the program he signed ever processes a single application, handing implementation and any court fight to his successor. AB 2624 cleared the Legislature on votes that broke almost entirely along party lines, passing the Assembly on Aug. 18 and the Senate the following day. Whether the law survives a First Amendment challenge, and how narrowly courts read its intent-to-incite language, will likely shape how aggressively California nonprofits and their critics test its limits once the confidentiality program finally opens for business.
