California lawmakers are pushing various immigration-related bills this year

Just three days after ICU nurse Alex Pretti was killed by Border Patrol officers in Minneapolis, California senators advanced a bill meant to make it easier for people to sue federal immigration officials if their civil rights have been violated.

Proponents said Senate Bill 747 is a “first in the nation” type of bill — and it’s called the “No Kings Act,” a reference to the nationwide demonstrations against President Donald Trump that have occurred throughout his second term — that closes a loophole that allowed federal officers to be treated differently than state or local law enforcement for alleged constitutional violations.

“This bill stands for the basic proposition that no one, no one, is above the law,” said Sen. Scott Wiener, an author of the bill. “California is not going to let these thugs get away with it. We’re not going to let them overrun our communities just because they think they can.”

But Sen. Tony Strickland, who, along with the rest of his GOP colleagues, voted against the bill, said the effort was “a little bit more about politics and a little less about policy.” It shouldn’t be a surprise, he said, that Trump is “enforcing our federal immigration laws.”

“No one likes to see what’s going on in Minnesota, and you want to make sure that doesn’t happen here. Nobody on this floor wants that,” Strickland said.

Instead, he proposed ending California’s sanctuary law, which limits how local law enforcement can aid federal immigration officials when pursuing people charged with nonviolent crimes.

Republican legislators did try to make some changes to that law last year. Their bill would have prevented local governments from restricting cooperation with federal immigration efforts more than the sanctuary state already allows and underscored the specific violent crimes exempted from that law.

But that effort, led by Sen. Brian Jones, R-San Diego, failed to make it out of the Senate Public Safety Committee, where the only support it received was from the committee’s lone GOP legislator, Sen. Kelly Seyarto, who represents communities in Orange County and the Inland Empire.

(The legislative session operates on a two-year cycle, beginning in odd years and running through even years.)

From prohibiting rental companies from doing business with ICE to a massive tax on for-profit detention centers, California legislators are proposing a bevy of immigration-related bills in 2026. These come in the wake of ramped-up immigration enforcement actions across the country, particularly in Minnesota.

You can track those bills, and others related to immigration, here. We’ll follow these bills through the legislative process, keep tabs on the fiscal impact, and bring you additional coverage of what the bills do. And keep checking back; we’ll continue to update this tracker as more work is done on immigration bills in Sacramento this year.

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