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 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.
