The Democrat supermajority in Sacramento has finally stopped pretending. For years, the state’s leadership insisted its sanctuary regime was about trust, about local resources, about keeping police focused on local crime. That was always a dodge, but at least it was a dodge with a fig leaf. The fig leaf is gone now. With AB 1896 — which its own authors cheerfully nicknamed the “GTFO Act” — the California Assembly has voted to blacklist a category of American law enforcement officers from public employment for the sin of enforcing federal law.
Read that again. Not misconduct. Not a disciplinary record. Not a single adjudicated finding against a single officer. The disqualifying act is having done the job Congress created and the President directed, at any point between January 20, 2025 and January 20, 2029 – the duration of President Trump’s second term.
Serve in ICE, Border Patrol, or CBP on immigration enforcement during those years, and California proposes to close the door on you — not just at police departments, but at cities, counties, school districts, and the state itself. Lie about it on an application and you’re looking at perjury exposure. A man who spent four years apprehending fentanyl mules in the desert is now ineligible drive a county bus in California. Talk about petty, childish, and vindictive.
WATCH:
INSANITY! California just passed a bill awaiting Gavin Newsom’s signature that would ban state and local law enforcement from hiring former ICE officers.
No Republican votes. They call it the Get the Feds Out Act.
THIS IS INSANE.
The ban hits ICE, Border Patrol, and CBP… pic.twitter.com/aNmWvz7ogS
— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) September 14, 2026
The name tells you everything about the spirit of the thing. “Get the Feds Out” is the polite expansion. Everyone involved knows what the letters actually stand for, which is precisely why they chose them. Assemblymember Mark Gonzalez said the bill “draws a moral line here in California.” A moral line. Legislators who cannot keep a city block in Los Angeles free of open-air drug markets have located their moral clarity in punishing the men and women who stop human smugglers.
There is a word for disqualifying citizens from public life based on which lawful government they served. Several words, actually, and none of them belong in an American statute book. We used to reserve loyalty tests and employment blacklists for the countries we ran propaganda broadcasts into. Now a state legislature has passed one on a party-line vote — not a single Republican aye — and sent it to a governor, Gavin Newsom, who will almost certainly sign it.
The police unions, notably, don’t want this. That should end the conversation, but it won’t, because the bill was never about public safety. California is short thousands of sworn officers. Departments are running mandatory overtime, closing substations, and watching veterans retire at the first eligible date. Into that shortage walks a pool of trained, federally vetted, background-checked law enforcement professionals — and Sacramento has decided the responsible move is to build a wall around them. They’ll build that one, at least.
The legal fate is easy enough to predict. The state’s ski-mask ban for federal agents got stopped in court. The Supremacy Clause is not a suggestion, and a rule that singles out federal employees for disability because of the federal duties they performed is not a close constitutional question. Expect an injunction well before the January 2028 effective date. Which is the real point: the authors get their headline, Newsom gets his applause line, the taxpayers get the legal bill, and the law was never expected to survive contact with a judge.
That’s the tell. When a legislature passes something it knows is unenforceable, it isn’t governing. It’s posting. And California has an entire capital devoted to it.
