Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill this month expanding privacy protections for immigration-service workers in California’s nonprofit and healthcare sectors, a move supporters call a necessary response to harassment and doxxing. Critics see something else. They argue the law makes scrutiny harder for a politically sensitive slice of the nonprofit world just as the federal government is pushing in the opposite direction.
The bill, AB 2624, extends California’s Safe at Home address-confidentiality program to providers, employees and volunteers at organizations that serve immigrants. The program began in 1998 as a safeguard for domestic violence victims, then widened over the years to cover other groups facing threats or harassment. This time, California added immigration-support workers.
Supporters say the bill answers a real problem. Workers have described being followed, threatened and targeted online because of the work they do. Critics, though, say the timing is hard to ignore. The bill arrived just after Nick Shirley released a series of videos alleging fraud at healthcare and daycare centers in primarily immigrant communities ranging from Michigan and Minnesota to New York and Los Angeles—and the political uproar followed fast. Due to this controversial timing, many have dubbed the new law “The Stop Nick Shirley Act.”
The opponents say California is making it riskier to identify or expose people tied to systems that already face growing fraud questions, especially in the nonprofit and healthcare space. To them, the state is adding friction to scrutiny, not just protecting workers as it claims.
That argument lands harder because Washington has spent the year moving the other way. The Justice Department has elevated healthcare fraud enforcement. Federal officials have also pushed for tighter reporting and disclosure from nonprofits. So while California is building a privacy shield around a narrow class of workers, the broader federal mood is demanding more visibility into the institutions around them.
That is the tension at the center of the bill. Supporters say it is about safety. Critics say it is about accountability. And in a year when the pressure is rising to ask harder questions about nonprofit and healthcare money, California chose to make some of the people inside that system harder to see.
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