The California State Assembly on Wednesday advanced a bill that would wrap taxpayer-funded immigration service organizations in new privacy protections, and one independent journalist says the legislation exists for the sole purpose of shutting down his investigative work.
AB 2624, formally titled "Privacy for Immigration Support Services Providers," passed the Assembly and was sent to the California Senate. The bill's author, Assemblymember Mia Bonta, a Democrat from Oakland, has argued that immigration service providers face harassment, doxxing campaigns, and threats. Critics, however, see something far less noble: a legislative shield designed to keep nonprofits that handle public money beyond the reach of accountability.
The bill has earned a pointed nickname, the "Stop Nick Shirley Act", from those who believe it targets the independent journalist whose undercover reporting has exposed alleged fraud at nonprofits and health care facilities across the country. Shirley himself appeared on Fox News @ Night with Trace Gallagher on Wednesday to push back against the legislation and the lawmakers behind it.
Shirley did not mince words about the timing or intent of AB 2624. He told Gallagher:
"I obviously hit a nerve."
He went further, framing the bill as a direct attempt to insulate organizations that receive taxpayer funding from the kind of scrutiny his reporting has brought.
"What's interesting about this, this bill is it's protecting NGOs and nonprofits. These are organizations and groups that receive our tax dollars, yet they want to make it so we [can't find out what they're] doing with our tax dollars."
Shirley claims the bill would place journalists and investigators at civil risk, including injunctions, attorney fees, and statutory damages, if covered organizations assert a reasonable fear for their safety. In other words, a nonprofit under investigation could use the law to punish the investigator rather than answer the questions.
That arrangement should trouble anyone who believes public money deserves public oversight. If an organization draws its funding from taxpayers, the taxpayers have every right to know where that money goes. A bill that raises the legal cost of asking that question is not protecting privacy. It is protecting opacity.
The bill's author, Mia Bonta, is married to California Attorney General Rob Bonta. That connection adds another layer to the controversy. Shirley alleged on air that Rob Bonta attempted to claim credit for exposing hospice fraud in California, fraud that Shirley says he uncovered first through his own reporting.
"Her husband actually tried to take credit for exposing the hospice fraud after I had went and exposed the hospice fraud."
Fox News Digital reached out to both Mia Bonta and Rob Bonta for comment. Neither responded. The silence is notable. When a lawmaker authors a bill that critics say targets a specific journalist, and that lawmaker's spouse is the state's top law enforcement officer, the public deserves an explanation, not radio silence.
The pattern Shirley describes, officials moving to restrict the people who expose problems rather than fixing the problems themselves, is familiar. It has surfaced in Minnesota, where a former fraud investigator told lawmakers he was pressured to bury evidence of a massive childcare scam. The instinct to protect institutions at the expense of accountability runs deep in certain corners of government.
Shirley's investigative work has focused on fraud schemes that, by his account, have drained public coffers of staggering sums. He referenced alleged fraud involving Somali nonprofits in Minnesota, describing losses in the range of "hundreds of millions, billions of dollars." He also pointed to hospice fraud cases inside California itself.
"The fraud has been going on for so long. These fraudsters thought they could get away with it for so long that so many people started committing this fraud."
His challenge to supporters of AB 2624 was blunt: stop the fraud, and there will be nothing to investigate.
"My response is stop using these communities, commit fraud, and no one will ever have any speculation about fraud taking place when we know that the fraud is very much real."
The scale of welfare and health care fraud across the country has drawn increasing attention from federal officials. Vice President Vance has signaled that blue-state officials could face prison time in a broader Medicaid fraud crackdown. At the state level, investigators have uncovered schemes so brazen that hundreds of companies were traced to a single address in Ohio.
Against that backdrop, California's response is telling. Rather than joining the effort to root out fraud, Sacramento advanced a bill that would make it harder for independent journalists to do the work that government agencies have failed to do themselves.
The bill drew sharp responses from political figures across the country. Rep. Tim Burchett posted on X with a terse verdict: "This is Democrat leadership." Republican New Hampshire congressional candidate Lily Tang Williams went further:
"Taxpayers should be outraged by this in CA. If CA signs this bill into law to protect fraudsters, Federal government must fight back."
Actor Dean Cain also weighed in online, though his specific comments were not detailed in Fox News's coverage of the Assembly vote.
What remains conspicuously absent is any substantive defense of the bill from its supporters. Mia Bonta's stated rationale, that immigration service providers face harassment and threats, has not been accompanied by specific evidence tying Shirley's reporting to any unlawful conduct. If the concern is doxxing or threats, California already has laws against those acts. AB 2624 does something different: it creates a new legal framework that could punish the act of investigation itself.
The Assembly did not release the vote count or margin, leaving the public without a clear picture of how much support the bill commands. The California Senate's timeline for taking up the bill also remains unknown.
Meanwhile, the broader fight over fraud accountability continues at the federal level. The House recently passed a bill to deport illegal immigrants who commit welfare fraud, with 186 Democrats voting against it. The pattern is consistent: one party moves to enforce the rules, and the other moves to blunt the enforcement tools.
Strip away the bill's formal title and its stated rationale, and what remains is a piece of legislation that raises the cost of asking uncomfortable questions about how public money is spent. It does not target harassment. It does not target threats. It targets scrutiny, the kind of scrutiny that led Shirley to uncover alleged fraud schemes that official agencies either missed or ignored.
The New York Post characterized the bill as California's latest attempt to criminalize journalism in order to protect fraud. That framing may be sharp, but it captures the core problem. When a state legislature responds to investigative reporting not by investigating the reported fraud but by restricting the reporter, the priorities are clear, and they are not aligned with the taxpayers footing the bill.
Shirley's work has put a spotlight on organizations that receive public dollars and, by his account, misuse them. The proper response to that spotlight is transparency. The California Assembly chose the opposite.
When the government's answer to exposed fraud is to make the exposing harder, it tells you everything you need to know about whose side they're on, and it isn't the taxpayer's.