California’s AB 2624 Would Criminalize Investigative Journalism — and Protect Fraud in the Process

A California bill advancing through the legislature would give taxpayer-funded organizations the power to silence journalists, impose $10,000-per-violation penalties on citizens who film them, and make accountability itself a crime. Here’s what you need to know.

A 24-year-old independent journalist from Utah named Nick Shirley spent months walking into California hospice offices, daycare centers, and government-funded facilities with a camera. What he found — dozens of addresses billing Medicare for patients who don’t exist, organizations operating as ghost businesses, and millions of taxpayer dollars vanishing into thin air — triggered a 42-million-view viral video and congressional scrutiny of California’s federally funded healthcare programs.

California’s response wasn’t an investigation. It wasn’t a legislative push to recover the money. It was a bill to punish the man holding the camera.

What AB 2624 Actually Does — And Why It Should Alarm You

Sponsored by Assemblywoman Mia Bonta (D-Oakland), Assembly Bill 2624 is marketed as a protection measure for immigrant services workers facing harassment and death threats. The stated intent sounds reasonable. The actual bill text is anything but.

AB 2624 builds a new legal chapter — “Privacy for Immigration Service Providers” — onto California’s existing Safe at Home address confidentiality program, originally designed to protect domestic violence survivors. Under the bill’s language, any person, business, or association that “publicly posts or displays” the image or personal information of a “designated immigration support services provider, employee, or volunteer” can be sued for damages starting at a minimum of $4,000 and rising to three times actual damages.

The criminal provisions go further. Post an image or personal information “with the intent that another person imminently use that information to commit a crime involving violence,” and you face a fine of up to $10,000 per violation, up to one year in county jail, or both. If the posting leads to bodily injury, it becomes a felony carrying up to $50,000 in fines and state prison.

The bill contains no exemption for journalists. None.

The Definition Is a Trap

The bill’s definition of “designated immigration support services” is sweeping. It covers legal representation, advocacy, case management, humanitarian relief, counseling, health care, and any facility that provides those services — including “nonprofit organizations offices” and “health care facilities.”

In other words, a government-funded organization that accepts public money and serves immigrants qualifies for legal protection from being filmed, named, or identified online.

The bill defines “image” to include photographs, video footage, sketches, and computer-generated images. It defines “personal information” to include names, physical descriptions, employment history, and financial information.

Put plainly: a citizen journalist filming a publicly operating nonprofit from a public street could face civil lawsuits and criminal penalties under this language — if the organization claims the publication was intended to incite harm. Given that vague intent standard, any organized backlash against a facility after a story runs could be used as post-hoc evidence against the reporter.

“This is not about protecting people from violence. This is about threatening and intimidating people who are trying to shine a light on bad behavior.” — California Assembly Member Carl DeMaio

Why This Matters: The Scale of the Fraud Is Staggering

To understand the stakes, consider the scale of what investigators have found. One analysis estimated that California’s In-Home Supportive Services program alone hemorrhages approximately $6 billion in fraud annually. Shirley’s videos identified more than $170 million in suspected fraudulent hospice billing. State records show as many as 89 hospice companies registered at a single Los Angeles office building.

Congressional members have taken notice, and California officials have acknowledged the problem publicly. The fraud isn’t speculative. In that context, AB 2624 doesn’t look like a good-faith privacy measure. It looks like a legislative firewall.

A Glaring Conflict of Interest

Assemblywoman Mia Bonta is the wife of California Attorney General Rob Bonta — the state’s top law enforcement officer, whose office would be among those empowered to prosecute AB 2624 violations. A bill criminalizing the exposure of publicly funded organizations, introduced by the AG’s spouse, with no journalist exemption, is not entitled to the benefit of the doubt.

Republican Assembly Member Carl DeMaio confronted Bonta directly during committee. “You do not provide an exemption for journalists,” he told her. “Posting a video of fake hospices — 90 fake hospices, dozens of ‘learning’ centers — would apparently be punishable under your law.”

The bill passed committee anyway and now heads to the Assembly Judiciary Committee.

What Critics Get Wrong — And What They Get Right

Supporters argue the bill is narrowly targeted. Bonta told her committee that advocates and workers are “receiving death threats, being targeted at courthouses, and facing coordinated online doxxing campaigns.” That concern isn’t fabricated — harassment and doxxing are real problems.

But here’s what supporters don’t answer: existing harassment statutes, anti-doxxing laws, and civil tort remedies already cover genuine threats. AB 2624 doesn’t fill a legal gap — it creates a new one, tilting the scales so the burden of proof falls on the journalist, not the organization.

When the same legal framework designed to protect domestic violence survivors is being stretched to cover government-funded nonprofits with million-dollar public contracts, something has gone wrong — either in the drafting room or in the intent.

This Is a First Amendment Crisis in Slow Motion

California has been here before. In 2015, journalist David Daleiden released undercover footage of Planned Parenthood officials. California’s response was to prosecute Daleiden — not investigate Planned Parenthood. That case dragged through courts for nearly a decade before the final charge was dismissed and expunged earlier this year.

The lesson Sacramento apparently took wasn’t that weaponizing recording laws against journalists is wrong. It was that the strategy needed better statutory scaffolding. AB 2624 provides exactly that.

When accountability becomes the crime, corruption becomes the policy.

What Happens If This Passes

If AB 2624 becomes law, the chilling effect on journalism will be immediate. Any independent journalist considering filming a publicly operating organization in California will have to weigh whether their footage could be characterized as threatening. Any outlet that publishes an investigative story naming employees or displaying video faces a civil lawsuit with a $4,000 floor and no ceiling.

Most people won’t risk it. That is the point.

California already has the nation’s most expansive fraud problem in federally-funded social programs, a governor whose office responded to Shirley’s investigation with mockery rather than accountability, and a legislature now building legal tools to ensure the next watchdog thinks twice before pointing a camera at a ghost hospice.

This is not a privacy bill. It is a suppression bill.

Key Takeaway

AB 2624 would make it a criminal offense — punishable by up to $10,000 in fines and one year in jail — to publish images or information about publicly funded organizations, with no exemption for journalists, no carve-out for matters of public interest, and no requirement that actual harm occur. It is currently moving through the California Assembly and has not yet received the national attention it deserves.

What You Can Do

This story is moving fast — and most Californians don’t know it exists yet. Share this article, call your Assembly representative, and demand a journalist exemption before AB 2624 reaches the floor. Support the independent journalists whose work makes stories like this possible. If California criminalizes accountability, every other state is watching.

Free speech doesn’t defend itself. Neither does your tax money.