CHIRLA Action Fund 2015 California Legislative Scorecard

CHIRLA Action Fund identified critical votes on issues important to aspiring citizens and immigrant communities. CHIRLA’s Action Fund’s Legislative Scorecard is designed to provide the public with information about how their state legislator voted on bills on these important issues. Click the link below to view the list of state legislators and their vote percentage:

CHIRLA Action Fund California Elected Score Card for 2015.

CHIRLA Action Fund analyzed the votes on twenty-three state proposals, affecting immigrants and their children in the areas of criminal and environmental justice, access to public benefits, as well as civil and labor rights.

Lawmakers have the opportunity to cast their votes in policy, fiscal committees, as well as on the Assembly or Senate Floor. Furthermore, a proposal can be subject to a concurrence vote, which means the approval by the House of origin to changes made to a bill while it was on the second House. For the purposes of CHIRLA’s Action Fund Legislative Scorecard the votes that were taken into account were floor votes only, not including concurrence votes. Unless, a proposal did not reach a floor vote, those lawmakers who had the opportunity to cast their votes were scored.

2015 State Proposals Summary

Assembly Bills

AB 60 (Gonzalez): Strengthens consumer protections for immigrant seeking legal assistance with private attorneys.

AB 206 (Stone): Establishes California Dream Work-Study Program to assist students who are non U.S citizens but authorize to work to participate in college work study programs.

AB 359 (Gonzalez): Provides labor protections for grocery workers when Grocery Stores Corporations merge together.

AB 622 (Hernandez): Prevents the misuse and abuse by unscrupulous employers of E-verify federal and flaw program.

AB 813 (Gonzalez): Creates a mechanism for people to challenge legally invalid convictions after criminal custody has ended and the time period for hebeas corpus relief has passed.

AB 829 (Nazarian): Expands opportunity for people to be notify if their names are in a shared gang data base and creates a process for them to request their names remove from these databases.

AB 899 (Levine): Protects confidential juvenile files from being shared with federal agencies, unless order by a court order.

AB 900 (Levine): Aligns state law with immigration law to allow for the maximum number of youth in California to be eligible to receive humanitarian relief through the Special Immigrant Juvenile Status Visa.

AB 953 (Weber): Aims to curb the harmful and unjust practice of racial profiling and increase transparency and accountability with law enforcement agencies.

AB 1065 (Chiu): Protects immigrant workers who recently legalized their status from being discriminated when applying for a job.

AB 1343 (Thurmond): Requires defense counsel to provide accurate and affirmative information to a client who is not a U.S. citizen about potential immigration consequences of a proposed plea. Requires both prosecution and defense counsel to contemplate immigration consequences in the plea negotiation process.

AB 1351 (Eggman): Modifies current process of deferred entry of judgment programs, which are alternatives to court proceedings that allow offenders to participate in a drug rehabilitation treatments, to avoid negative unintended consequences to offenders who are non U.S. citizens.

AB 1352 (Eggman): Ends unintended immigration consequences for non U.S. citizens who successfully complete a deferred entry of judgment programs, which are alternatives to court proceedings that allow offenders to participate in a drug rehabilitation treatments.

AB 1366 (Lopez): Establishes Dream Resources Center at institutions of higher education to assist students who are AB 540.

Senate Bills

SB 4 (Lara): Expands healthcare coverage for all children in our state regardless of immigration status.

SB 200 (Lara): Updates state school residency laws to ensure live-in workers such as household workers, caregivers and gardeners whose children live with them could attend school on that district.

SB 350 (De Leon): Seeks to reduce pollution and increase clean energy sources.

SB 406 (Jackson): Expands job protection for workers who take family leave to businesses with 25 employees or more. Under the California Family Leave Act, jobs are only protected for those who work at businesses with at least 50 employees.

SB 443 (Mitchell): Requires additional due process protections in cases where the state seeks to forfeit assets in connection to specific criminal charges.

SB 588 (De Leon): Strengthens labor protections for low-income workers who are victims of wage theft by providing new enforcement tool to collect the wages of these workers.

SB 600 (Pan): Includes citizenship, language and immigration status among the list for which discrimination is prohibited under the Unruh Civil Rights Act.

SB 623 (Lara): Clarifies that undocumented workers are eligible for certain workers’ compensation benefits.

SB 674 (De Leon/Atkins): Establishes uniform protocols to ensure immigrant who are victims of crime are able to be certified by local law enforcement to be eligible to request immigration relief.