The California Legislature spent the final hours of its session doing something no state has tried before: writing a law that would make a federal immigration officer permanently unemployable by any public body in California. The measure is Assembly Bill 1896, and its authors gave it a name that leaves no doubt about what they think of the people it targets. They call it the GTFO Act — Get the Feds Out.
It cleared both chambers and went to Gavin Newsom’s desk, where it now sits alongside a companion bill banning police from wearing electric-shock gloves. Neither has been signed. Neither has been vetoed. And under the way California handles bills passed at the end of a session, the governor may not have to lift a pen at all for the first one to take effect.
What AB 1896 Would Do to a Federal Agent’s Résumé
The bill’s operative language is short and unusually blunt. As posted on the Legislature’s own bill page, AB 1896 adds a new Section 1025 to the Government Code providing that a person is disqualified from public employment — “including, but not limited to, employment with a city, county, district, or any other public agency of the state” — because they were previously employed by an entity that engaged in immigration enforcement on or after January 20, 2025, through January 20, 2029.
Note what that sentence does and does not require. It does not require a conviction. It does not require a finding of misconduct, a sustained complaint, an arrest, or a disciplinary record of any kind. The disqualifying act is having held the job during the second Trump administration. A deportation officer who served four years without a single allegation against him is disqualified on precisely the same terms as one who was fired for cause, because the statute never asks. The bill’s own findings supply the theory: immigration enforcement agents, it declares, “have consistently shown they are unwilling to stand up to orders, and therefore do not align with the core values of this state’s law enforcement or public employee missions.”
The reach is the part local officials should read twice. This is not a police-hiring rule. It sweeps every public agency in the state — police departments, sheriff’s offices, school districts, city halls, county agencies, the state civil service. The bill leaves a narrow carve-out allowing a former agent accepted into California’s basic police academy course to be evaluated case by case, and preserves cooperation already permitted under the 2017 California Values Act. Everything else closes.
Mark González Named It After a Profanity and Passed It 53-21
The author is Assemblymember Mark González, a Los Angeles Democrat, joined by Speaker Robert Rivas and thirteen other Democratic sponsors. Not one Republican put a name on it. The Assembly passed it 53 to 21 on May 27, and it ground through four Senate committee votes over the summer, picking up amendments in August as the session ran out.
González has never pretended the bill is a neutral personnel standard. Announcing it, he described immigration agents who “invade our communities,” who “kidnap neighbors,” who “choose VIOLENCE over PEACE,” and finished the thought, per California Globe, with “enough of this shit.” He has also said the bill “will ensure killers, terror instigators, and kidnappers are not serving the good people of California” — a description of federal officers who have been neither charged nor convicted of anything.
Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher made the obvious objection on the floor and lost. “We have immigration laws for a reason. And they do have to be enforced,” he said, per TheBlaze. “This bill is blatantly unconstitutional.” The same report notes that ICE arrested more than 50,000 people in California between January 2025 and July 2026, using records compiled by the Deportation Data Project — which is the volume of enforcement the Legislature is now proposing to attach a lifetime employment penalty to.
One caution on the paperwork, stated plainly rather than glossed. The Legislature’s electronic record as mirrored by third-party trackers had, at the time of writing, ingested actions only through August 28, when the bill sat on the Senate’s third-reading file. Final Senate passage on August 30 and Assembly concurrence on August 31 are carried by POLITICO, the Los Angeles Times wire and CalMatters’ legislative tracker. What is independently verifiable from the state itself is the negative: the governor’s own signing announcement for August 31 lists thirteen bills, and AB 1896 is not among them.
Newsom Does Not Have to Sign It for It to Become Law
This is the detail that changes the politics of the next four weeks. Under Article IV, Section 10 of the California Constitution, a bill left in the governor’s possession after the Legislature adjourns becomes a statute if he does not return it within thirty days. Reporting on the immigration package puts that deadline at September 30. Newsom’s office declined to say whether he will sign.
That gives him an exit no other governor in the country would be handed on a bill this aggressive. He can decline to endorse it, decline to defend it, say nothing at all, and watch it become California law by the calendar — collecting the benefit with none of the signature. A veto, by contrast, would be an affirmative act against his own party’s immigrant-rights package in the last cycle before a presidential race he is widely assumed to want. Silence is the cheapest option on the board, and it is also the option that enacts the bill.
The Shock-Glove Ban and the $16.7 Million Contract Behind It
AB 1896 did not travel alone. Assemblymember LaShae Sharp-Collins of San Diego moved AB 2760, which bans law enforcement in California — federal officers included — from using devices that deliver an electric shock, and bars state and local agencies from buying them with state funds. The trigger was an ICE procurement: CalMatters reported that the agency was set to award Kentucky-based Compliant Technologies a $16.7 million contract for 6,000 pairs of shock-delivering gloves, part of a DHS effort to spend as much as $20 million on them.
The Department of Homeland Security’s answer was not a legal brief. “Sanctuary politicians attempting to ban our federal law enforcement from any safety equipment is despicable and a deliberate attempt to undermine and endanger our officers,” a spokesperson said in a statement reported by UPI. “To be crystal clear: we will not abide by unconstitutional bans. The Supremacy Clause makes it clear that California’s sanctuary politicians do not control federal law enforcement.” Sacramento passed a rule on Sunday. Washington announced on Monday that it will ignore it.
The Supremacy Clause Problem That Already Killed the Mask Ban
California has run a version of this experiment already and lost. Senate Bill 627, the state’s ban on immigration agents wearing masks, took effect at the start of this year and was blocked by a Ninth Circuit panel in April as a likely violation of the Supremacy Clause, according to the same CalMatters reporting cited above. States cannot dictate the operational conduct of federal officers, which is why UC Davis law professor Vikram Amar told that outlet that measures of this kind are “kind of more performative than real.”
AB 1896 is drafted to survive that reasoning, and it is a genuinely clever piece of drafting. It regulates California’s own hiring rather than federal conduct, which is territory a state ordinarily controls outright. But intergovernmental immunity bars a state from singling out the federal government or those who deal with it for discriminatory treatment, and this bill does nothing else — it identifies a class of people solely by their federal employment during a named president’s term and attaches a penalty to it. If the courts read it as a punishment for federal service dressed up as a hiring standard, it follows the mask ban. If they do not, every blue state in the country has a template for making service in a Republican administration a permanent career disqualification, and the precedent will not stay pointed at ICE.
This article was researched and drafted with the assistance of AI tools, with sourcing verified against primary government documents.
Elias Broderick specializes in residential and commercial real estate, with a focus on market cycles, property fundamentals, and investment strategy. His writing translates complex housing and development trends into clear insights for both new and experienced investors. At The Daily Overview, Elias explores how real estate fits into long-term wealth planning.
