Exposing Nonprofit Fraud Could Come With a Price Tag

Say you’re a journalist — freelancer, independent outlet, citizen reporter with a camera. You publish a story about a government-funded immigration nonprofit. You name staff members. You include a photo from a public event. Under California AB 2624, that’s a potential $4,000 fine per violation, plus attorney fees. There is no press exemption anywhere in the bill.

Assemblywoman Mia Bonta (D-Alameda) authored it. It cleared the Assembly Public Safety Committee 7-2 on April 21 and was re-referred to Appropriations six days later. It is now one committee vote away from the Assembly floor.

What AB 2624 Does

Bonta’s bill extends California’s 25-year-old Safe at Home address confidentiality program to immigration support service providers. Safe at Home was built to protect domestic violence victims. It was later expanded to reproductive healthcare workers. Those expansions were narrow and uncontroversial.

AB 2624 follows the same template but applies it to a vastly broader category, then adds legal penalties on top. “Designated immigration support services” covers legal representation, advocacy, case management, humanitarian relief, translation, counseling, and health care at nonprofits, legal clinics, law offices, and healthcare facilities. Any organization providing “advocacy” or “referrals” to immigrants qualifies.

The criminal standard is high: prosecutors would need to prove intent to facilitate imminent violence. Experts say that would be very difficult to prove against a journalist.

That may be true, but it ignores the fact even the threat of prosecution or a lawsuit has the potential to chill speech.

The Chilling Effect

The bill’s real weapon isn’t the criminal penalty. It’s the civil suit. You don’t need a prosecutor to file a civil action. You need a plaintiff with a lawyer. A $4,000 minimum per violation, plus attorney fees, is enough to make any freelancer or independent outlet think twice before publishing an investigation of a covered organization.

A well-funded nonprofit with a legal team on retainer can file and litigate even a weak case; a freelancer or local outlet cannot afford to find out if they’d win. The process is the punishment. The threat of a suit is itself the deterrent, regardless of merit. You don’t have to prove the case. You just have to make the reporter do the math.

The strongest defense of AB 2624 is that it addresses real threats. CHIRLA (Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights), the nonprofit that sponsored the bill, has documented incidents of harassment.

Following people to their homes is wrong, and existing law already makes it illegal.

But AB 2624 doesn’t just target the people making threats. It creates a broad legal category that could shield thousands of organizations from public scrutiny, whether or not they’ve experienced any documented threats at all.

Assemblymember Carl DeMaio (R-Assembly District 75) dubbed it the “Stop Nick Shirley Act” after the citizen journalist whose viral videos exposed alleged fraud at government-funded organizations. “This is not about protecting people from violence,” DeMaio said. “This is about threatening and intimidating people who are trying to shine a light on bad behavior.”

When KCRA asked Bonta’s office how she could guarantee news organizations wouldn’t be sued, spokesman Daniel McGreevy responded: “The bill is not intended to impede journalism, and we’re committed to ensuring that’s clear in the language.”

But if the bill isn’t intended to impede journalism, why not write that into the bill?

Even Chris Micheli, a McGeorge School of Law professor who defended the bill’s narrow construction, acknowledged it needs work. The bill should be clarified, he said, to “ensure those types of lawsuits wouldn’t become common place.”.

Bipartisan Pushback

The discomfort is bipartisan. Democrat Assemblywoman LaShae Sharp Collins (D-San Diego) told Bonta she recommends “still having that dialogue” with journalists. “No one should fear being able to do their work to provide for their family,” she added.

Republican Tom Lackey called the bill “a lightning rod…causing a lot of stir and concern.”.

When members of both parties are publicly recommending consultation with journalists about a bill’s impact on journalism, that’s not a partisan complaint. That’s a red flag.

The Need for Transparency

CHIRLA has received $14.3 million in state taxpayer dollars since 2020, according to the California Department of Social Services. That’s $14.3 million in public money flowing to the very organization that sponsored legislation to make itself harder to investigate. Organizations at that scale of taxpayer funding should face more scrutiny, not less.

This is not to suggest that CHIRLA has committed fraud. But government-funded nonprofits as a category have a documented, statewide fraud problem — and the cases that get caught are exposed by journalists and investigators, not by the nonprofit sector’s own oversight. Sheryl Davis, the former executive director of San Francisco’s Human Rights Commission, was arrested on 19 felony counts for allegedly steering $8.5 million in public funds to her live-in partner’s nonprofit. The Providence Foundation was charged with stealing $115,000 from homeless families through fake invoices. In both cases, it was accountability journalism and dogged investigation that brought the fraud to light. AB 2624 would create a legal shield for this entire category of organization — the exact category where public-dollar fraud keeps surfacing. Public money demands public scrutiny. This bill chills precisely the kind of reporting that catches it.

Mia Bonta is married to Attorney General Rob Bonta, who has said he will return over $155,000 in campaign contributions received from the Duongs, the family whose businesses and home were raided by the FBI. The Los Angeles Times editorial board called out the conflict of interest when Mia chaired the Assembly budget subcommittee overseeing her husband’s Department of Justice. Now she’s authoring legislation that would shield government-funded nonprofits from the kind of oversight her husband’s office is supposed to provide.

This isn’t about immigration policy. It isn’t about whether CHIRLA’s work is valuable — reasonable people can disagree on policy and still agree that immigrant communities deserve advocates. The principle at stake is foundational and American: organizations that spend public money must be accountable to the public, and the press is the mechanism the First Amendment was designed to protect.

AB 2624 still has to clear Appropriations, the full Assembly, the State Senate, and the Governor’s desk. If Mia Bonta is sincere, the fix is straightforward: add an explicit press exemption and narrow the definition of covered facilities to organizations with verified, documented threats. Contact your Assembly member and the Appropriations Committee before this bill advances further. California already has strong anti-harassment and anti-stalking laws. We don’t need a new one that puts a $4,000 price tag on accountability journalism.