Newsom signs controversial bill letting relatives care for kids if parents are deported

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Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sunday signed a bill allowing a broad range of relatives to step in as children’s caregivers if their parents are deported, a measure that had provoked a firestorm of conservative criticism.

Assembly Bill 495 will also bar daycare providers from collecting immigration information about a child or their parents, and allow parents to nominate a temporary legal guardian for their child in family court.

“We are putting on record that we stand by our families and their right to keep their private information safe, maintain parental rights and help families prepare in case of emergencies,” Newsom said in a press release.

It was one of several measures the Democratic-dominated Legislature pushed this year in response to the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation crackdown in Los Angeles and across California. Newsom, a Democrat, signed several of those other bills — banning Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from wearing masks in the state and requiring schools and hospitals to require warrants when officers show up — in a ceremony in L.A. last month.

He left AB 495 undecided for weeks, prompting a flurry of advocacy by immigrants’ rights groups to secure Newsom’s signature in the face of intense pushback from conservative activists. The governor announced his decision the day before his deadline to sign or veto the over 800 bills lawmakers sent to his desk last month.

The most controversial aspect of the bill concerns an obscure, decades-old form called a caregiver’s authorization affidavit. Relatives of a child whose parents are temporarily unavailable, and with whom the child is living, can attest to being the child’s caregiver; the designation allows the adult to enroll the child in school, take them to the doctor and consent to medical and dental care.

The new law will broaden who is allowed to sign the caregiver affidavit, from more traditional definitions of relatives to any adult in the family who is “related to the child by blood, adoption, or affinity within the fifth degree of kinship,” which includes people like great aunts or cousins. Parents can cancel the caregiver designation, which is intended to be a temporary arrangement and does not give that person custody.

Proponents said parents at risk of deportation should get to choose someone trusted to care for their children if ICE detains them. Expanding who is eligible for the caregiver form, they said, gives immigrant parents more options because they may not have close relatives in the country but benefit from strong ties with extended family or informal community networks.

The legislation was backed by immigrants’ rights groups and children’s advocates such as the Alliance for Children’s Rights and First 5 California.

“I introduced this bill so children do not have to wonder what will happen to them if their parents are not able to pick them up from school,” bill author Assemblymember Celeste Rodriguez, an Arleta Democrat, said at a recent press conference.

But Republicans, the religious right and parental rights’ activists argued the bill would instead endanger children.

They claimed it would allow strangers to sign the affidavit and claim the child into their care. Hundreds of opponents showed up at the Capitol by busload to rally against the legislation, organized by Pastor Jack Hibbs of the Calvary Chapel Chino Hills megachurch, who called it “the most dangerous bill we’ve seen” in Sacramento. Some of the blowback stemmed from false claims that the bill would allow strangers to get custody of children to whom they’re not related.

Assemblymember Carl DeMaio, a San Diego Republican, called the legislation “a human trafficker’s dream.”

In an email, Greg Burton, vice president of the California Family Council, took issue with the fact that parents might not be there when the affidavit form is signed.

“What are parental rights?” he wrote. “These rights are nothing if someone else can claim them by simply signing a form.”

Over the summer Rodriguez narrowed the legislation to exclude “nonrelative extended family members” but it was not enough to quell the controversy. The legislation passed along party lines.

In comparison to a fairly progressive Legislature, the governor has often positioned himself as a moderating force on child custody and protection issues, which regularly galvanize conservative activists and put California Democrats on the defensive. In 2023 he vetoed a bill that would have required family court judges to consider a parent’s support of a child’s gender transition in custody disputes.

At a press conference last week where activists urged Newsom to sign the bill, Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrants’ Rights Los Angeles, asked the governor “to not listen to the lies, to not listen to all the other stuff that’s being said about this bill.”

Newsom, announcing his decision, quietly acknowledged the controversy in a press release. He included statements he said were “correcting the record” on mischaracterizations and said the new law does not change the fact that parental rights and legal guardianships must be decided by family court judges.

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This story was originally published by CalMatters and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.