Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill expanding address-confidentiality protections to nonprofit workers who serve immigrants, a measure Republican lawmakers and a prominent independent journalist say was designed to shield fraud from public scrutiny.
Assembly Bill 2624, authored by Democratic Assemblywoman Mia Bonta of Alameda, adds employees of nonprofits that assist people navigating the immigration system to California's Safe at Home program. That program provides substitute mailing addresses to people considered especially vulnerable to targeted attacks and violent threats. It already covers domestic violence survivors, elder abuse victims, and workers in reproductive and gender-affirming health care. The new law takes effect Oct. 1, 2027.
Newsom signed the bill on a Saturday, just days after a bizarre incident outside the state Capitol in Sacramento drew national attention to the measure and to the conduct of a senior Democratic legislative staffer. The signing capped months of debate over whether the bill protects vulnerable workers or makes it harder for journalists and investigators to document potential fraud in taxpayer-funded immigrant-services programs.
On Wednesday, independent journalist and YouTuber Nick Shirley was conducting a sidewalk interview outside the California State Capitol when Terry Schanz, chief of staff to Democratic Assemblywoman Tina McKinnor, allegedly barged into the conversation. Schanz held up a printed flyer and, as the New York Post reported, made a crude remark in front of bystanders.
The statement, directed at Shirley, was blunt and juvenile: "Did you guys hear that Nick Shirley has a small penis allegedly?"
Schanz earns $17,319 a month, $207,828 a year, in taxpayer-funded compensation. Multiple complaints have since been filed with the California Legislature's HR department over his conduct. Sacramento television station KCRA reported that Schanz is expected to face consequences, though no specific disciplinary outcome has been announced.
The Capitol sidewalk episode was not Schanz's first brush with controversy. He was named in a 2025 wrongful-termination lawsuit that alleged political bullying and a toxic workplace culture within top Assembly leadership. Separately, his office faced scrutiny in January over allegations that staff pressured the nonprofit newsroom CalMatters to alter footage involving Assemblywoman McKinnor. That dispute reportedly began after a CalMatters reporter asked McKinnor a tough question about an expensive designer handbag.
A pattern of conduct like that would sink most political staffers. In Sacramento, it earns you a six-figure salary and a front-row seat to the policy fight you helped make famous.
Bonta introduced AB 2624 in February after what she described as increased threats and harassment against immigration service providers. She framed the bill as a direct response to a climate of fear.
Bonta told reporters:
"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."
Shirley, the journalist at the center of the controversy, offered a sharply different account. He said AB 2624 was created after he exposed what he called widespread fraud in immigrant communities in California and Minnesota. His videos, which went viral, followed immigrant workers and accused them of misusing public funds. After the Minnesota videos gained traction, Shirley traveled to San Diego to continue his reporting.
Republican lawmakers in California and Washington have sided with Shirley's reading of the bill. Assemblyman Carl DeMaio of San Diego coined the nickname "Stop Nick Shirley Act," a label that stuck and became the bill's informal identity in conservative media. Republican senators in Congress have separately introduced legislation to crack down on child care fraud in the wake of the Minnesota scandal Shirley's reporting helped bring to light.
In the U.S. Senate, Sen. Ashley Moody, a Florida Republican, went further, referring to AB 2624 as the "Protect Fraudsters Act." Bonta rejected that characterization, saying the law does not conflate legitimate journalism with the kind of doxxing targeted by the Safe at Home program, though no verbatim quote from Bonta on that specific point has been published.
Newsom himself linked the bill's rationale to Shirley's work months before signing it. In February, the governor said Somali daycare providers in Minnesota were "under siege" following Shirley's arrival in that state. The framing cast Shirley not as a journalist pursuing a story but as a catalyst for harassment, a characterization Shirley and his supporters reject.
The governor's willingness to single out an independent journalist by implication, and then sign a bill widely understood as a response to that journalist's reporting, raises questions that neither Newsom nor Bonta has publicly addressed. Did the governor or the bill's author make any statement connecting the Schanz incident to the signing? The record, as it stands, is silent on that point.
Newsom already faces federal scrutiny over his personal finances and political operation. A governor under that kind of pressure choosing this moment to sign a bill that critics say protects potential fraudsters from public accountability is a decision that invites its own conclusions.
California's Safe at Home program was designed for people facing genuine physical danger, survivors of domestic violence and elder abuse chief among them. Expanding it to cover nonprofit employees who work with immigrants is a policy choice that moves the program into politically contested territory.
The bill's supporters frame the expansion as a natural extension of existing protections. But the practical effect, critics argue, is that workers at organizations receiving public funds to serve immigrant communities can now shield their home addresses from the kind of scrutiny that journalists like Shirley have used to document potential fraud. When federal prosecutors have charged hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud tied to programs serving similar populations, making it harder to identify the people running those programs is a policy choice with real consequences.
Bonta's office has maintained that AB 2624 targets doxxing, not journalism. But the bill's informal name, coined by a Republican legislator and embraced by critics nationwide, tells you how the political class on both sides understands its real purpose.
The conduct of Schanz, a senior staffer to a Democratic assemblywoman, only sharpened the contrast. Here was a taxpayer-funded political operative allegedly harassing the very journalist the bill's critics say the legislation was written to hamper, days before the governor signed it. Schanz's prior involvement in a wrongful-termination lawsuit and the CalMatters pressure allegations suggest a staffer accustomed to operating without meaningful accountability.
Meanwhile, the guilty plea of a former Newsom aide in a separate federal case has already cast a shadow over the governor's political operation. Signing a bill that critics say shields potential fraud from journalistic exposure does nothing to dispel the impression that accountability runs in one direction in Sacramento, toward the people asking questions, not the people spending the money.
Several gaps remain. No specific disciplinary outcome for Schanz has been made public. The status of the 2025 wrongful-termination lawsuit naming him is unclear. The CalMatters footage allegation has not been publicly resolved. And neither Newsom nor Bonta has addressed whether the Schanz incident factored into the timing or optics of the bill signing.
Shirley, for his part, has continued to frame his work as straightforward accountability journalism, the kind of reporting that follows public money and asks where it goes. Whether AB 2624 will meaningfully obstruct that work or simply add a bureaucratic layer remains to be seen when the law takes effect in October 2027.
But the message from Sacramento is already clear enough. A journalist documents potential fraud. A $200,000-a-year political staffer on the taxpayer dime confronts him with a crude personal attack on the Capitol steps. And the governor signs a law that bears the journalist's name as a warning label. In California, the people asking uncomfortable questions get the bill named after them. The people spending the money get the protections.
