Gov. Gavin Newsom signed California’s controversial “Cease Nick Shirley Act” into legislation on Saturday, simply days after a radical left-wing operative crashed the journalist’s Capitol interview and launched a crude private assault on him.
Meeting Invoice 2624 expands California’s Secure at House program to workers of nonprofits that serve individuals navigating the immigration system.
Critics have blasted the measure as a strategy to intimidate individuals “making an attempt to shine mild on dangerous conduct.”
The legislation takes impact Oct. 1, 2027.
This system already covers home violence survivors, elder abuse victims and reproductive and gender-affirming well being care employees by offering substitute mailing addresses for individuals thought-about notably susceptible to focused assaults and violent threats.
Democratic Assemblywoman Mia Bonta (D-Alameda), launched the invoice in February after stories of elevated threats and harassment in opposition to immigration service suppliers.
“Our immigrant service suppliers live in concern due to extremists trying to demonize the work that they do and the populations they serve,” Bonta stated Saturday. “That’s an insupportable consequence of the anti-immigrant rhetoric that exists proper now.”
Republicans gave the measure the nickname of the “Cease Nick Shirley Act,” coined by Assemblyman Carl DeMaio, R-San Diego.
Shirley, an impartial journalist and YouTuber, has made movies following immigrant employees and accusing them of fraud.
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He has criticized AB 2624, saying it was created after he “uncovered widespread fraud in immigrant communities” in California and Minnesota.
The controversy intensified after Shirley traveled to San Diego following the viral success of movies he produced about Minnesota.
Newsom stated in February that Somali daycare suppliers there have been “underneath siege” following Shirley’s arrival.
Then got here a weird twist.
On Wednesday, Shirley was conducting a sidewalk interview exterior the California State Capitol in Sacramento when Terry Schanz, chief of workers to Democratic Assemblywoman Tina McKinnor, allegedly barged into the encounter.
Schanz earns $17,319 a month, or $207,828 a yr, in taxpayer-funded compensation.
He held up a printed flyer and requested: “Did you guys hear that Nick Shirley has a small penis allegedly?”
In accordance to KCRA, a number of complaints have since been filed with the California Legislature’s HR division, and Schanz is anticipated to face penalties.
The episode is a clumsy backdrop for a invoice whose supporters say is designed to fight harassment and doxxing.
Schanz has confronted different controversy, too.
His title surfaced in a 2025 wrongful-termination lawsuit containing allegations of political bullying and a poisonous office tradition inside high Meeting management.
His workplace additionally confronted scrutiny in January over allegations that it pressured nonprofit newsroom CalMatters to change footage involving McKinnor after a reporter requested her a tricky query about an costly designer purse.
The struggle over AB 2624 even reached the US Senate, the place Sen. Ashley Moody, R-Fla., referred to it because the “Shield Fraudsters Act.”
Bonta has rejected that characterization, saying the legislation doesn’t conflate reputable journalism with the doxxing focused by Secure at House.
However Newsom has now made the measure legislation.
