Newsom signs slew of anti-ICE, detention center bills

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Hello and welcome back to Capitol Confidential!

It’s Wednesday, the last day of bill-signing for the governor.

Gov. Gavin Newsom waited until the second-to-last day to drop his bill signings on what has become one of Democrats’ signature issues during President Donald Trump’s second administration: immigration. 

The governor greenlit all of this year’s most hot-button – and ambitious – anti-ICE and immigration detention center oversight bills. The 21 bills signed into law on Tuesday are a direct response to the Trump administration’s mass deportation and immigration enforcement crackdown, including bills placing a new state tax on private detention centers and a ban on ICE officers from using electroshock gloves in California. 

The list also includes two closely watched bills from Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco: SB747, known as the “No Kings Act” bill and SB1004, a re-do of last year’s “No Vigilantes Act.” 

SB747 closes a legal loophole that makes it difficult to sue federal officers, like Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents, over allegations they have violated a person’s constitutional rights – essentially lifting legal obstacles to make it easier for individuals and groups to hold agents accountable. 

As the Chronicle’s Sara DiNatale reported, the bill took effect immediately upon its signing, allowing people in the last year who have alleged mistreatment at the hands of immigration agents to file lawsuits against the officers.

SB1004 builds off another Wiener bill signed into law last year, the so-called “No Secret Police Act,” after a federal judge slapped it down earlier this year. In response, Wiener came back with SB1004, designed to sidestep the judge’s ruling and taking a new legal route by applying the ban to masks worn by both state and federal officers. Newsom’s signature was never a guarantee: Last year, reports suggested that state officers were carved out of Wiener’s original law at Newsom’s request. 

Other bills similarly place new limits on federal immigration agents’ activities in the state, like AB2760 by Assembly Member LaShae Sharp-Collins, D-San Diego, which bans both local and federal law enforcement officers from using wearable electroshock devices, specifically gloves, within the state.

AB1807 by Assembly Member Jesse Gabriel, D-Encino, prohibits ICE from using state-owned property for immigration enforcement staging, processing or detention, and AB1607 by Ávila Farías, D-Martinez bans ICE agents from becoming police officers in California. 

New laws also tackled ICE detention centers in the state, tightening oversight laws and placing new levies on the companies that operate them:

While the governor rubber-stamped nearly all of the big-ticket immigration and detention center bills, there’s one veto that has ruffled some feathers. 

Newsom over the weekend vetoed SB1194, by Caballero, which would have made an existing legal fellowship permanent. The program is designed to shore up immigration legal services in historically underserved, rural areas, where ICE raids are among the highest in the state.

The program, the Immigration Legal Fellowship Project, was created in 2019 as a pipeline for new attorneys to begin their careers with nonprofit organizations in the Central Valley and Central Coast, focusing on defending immigrants facing removal court proceedings. 

In his veto message, Newsom pointed to this year’s budget allocating funding for the program, calling the bill “duplicative and unnecessary.” 

The bill’s sponsor, Immigrant Defense Advocates, has criticized the move, saying the bill would have made the program permanent and exempted it from the uncertainty of annual budget negotiations. Hamid Yazdan Panah, co-executive director of the immigrant and detainee rights group, said the budget language also took out previous provisions that program funds be funneled to the state’s rural regions, amplifying concerns about the program’s future. 

Panah said the fellowship not only places new lawyers in rural communities to help families and individuals navigate removal proceedings and detentions, but also acts as a bridge that connects participating legal organizations to a pool of state funding. Once fellows reach three years in service, their host organization is able to qualify for specific funding set aside to bolster legal services for immigrants in the face of increasing ICE raids, detentions and deportations.

The attorney general’s office also supported the bill, alongside a broad coalition of the state’s leading immigrant rights advocacy groups.

In a statement, Panah and co-director Jackie Gonzalez, warned the veto sent a message that rural regions and immigrant communities can be “ignored.” 

“Rural and underserved regions do not simply need a one time allocation of more dollars somewhere within California’s immigration-services system,” they said in a statement. “They need attorneys, experienced organizations, training, mentorship, and an intentional pathway for communities that have historically received too little legal-services investment to build permanent capacity of their own.”

The program is funded for at least the next few years under the most recent budget allocation. 

Newsom signed legislation on Tuesday that will make it harder for the Trump administration to execute its plan to ramp up oil and gas production off the California coast, as the Chronicle’s Kurtis Alexander reported. 

The bill, AB1448 by Assembly Member Gregg Hart, D-Santa Barbara, was introduced in response to the Trump administration’s efforts last year to open up new drilling leases in federal waters along the California coast. 

The new law prevents oil and gas infrastructure in state-controlled waters from being used to support new federal drilling, essentially hamstringing proposed drilling projects by making transportation of oil and gas products more difficult. 

The U.S. Interior Department has commenced parts of a larger plan to offer new drilling leases in federal waters between the California-Mexico border and Mendocino County next year. The federal government has not issued a new offshore lease in the state since 1984, though drilling still occurs under old leases. New drilling is banned in state waters.

Two bills aimed at combating elements of California’s ongoing home insurance crisis gained Newsom’s signature this week, while two other overhaul bills received a veto. 

SB876 by Padilla and signed by Newsom on Sunday, dictates all home insurers in California must offer at least 50% extended replacement cost coverage to clients, giving homeowners more ways to recover financially after a disaster. It goes into effect at the start of next year.

The other bill to pass Newsom’s muster is SB1301, by Sen. Ben Allen, D-Santa Monica, which requires insurers starting in 2028 to give policyholders 90 days notice, up from 75, before their policy is nonrenewed. If the insurer determined the policy was being dropped for a reason the policyholder could fix, such as an outdated roof, it would require the insurer to give 120 days notice. Allen is running to become the state’s next insurance commissioner.

The two new laws are part of what has been a multipronged push by legislators to respond to the state’s insurance crisis, laid bare in the aftermath of the January 2025 Eaton and Palisades fires, as the Chronicle’s Megan Fan Munce and Susie Neilson reported. 

A Pulitzer Prize-winning Chronicle investigation published last year found many major insurance companies recommend policy limits to homeowners using an algorithm susceptible to mistakes that leave wildfire survivors without enough money to rebuild when their homes burn down — a phenomenon known as underinsurance. The problem is magnified after disasters, when wide-scale destruction causes the demand for contractors and materials to surge, raising prices.

SB877 and SB878, both authored by Pérez, would have required insurance companies to pay interest penalties for delayed payments and to provide policyholders with copies of all estimates created for their claims.

The bills followed widespread complaints from wildfire survivors alleging their insurers delayed making decisions and issuing payments. 

In his veto message, Newsom cited recent Department of Insurance reforms that regulate the way insurance companies write and price policies. He wrote that SB877 and SB878 “seek to codify portions of unrelated, existing regulations that are unnecessary at this time.”

Consumer advocates and wildfire survivors lambasted the vetoes. 

Carmen Balber, executive director of Consumer Watchdog, suggested the vetoes were “retaliation” after the group and and other wildfire survivor victim advocacy organizations, aggressively opposed Newsom’s attempt to reform how much utility companies pay in claims and other damages after their equipment sparks a conflagration. 

That effort failed in the frenzied final days of session, after Assembly Democrats refused to take up a watered-down version of Newsom’s original proposal. 

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