Gavin Newsom has spent years hunting for a way to run ICE out of California.

The courts slapped down his last attempt, so Sacramento went looking for a quieter weapon.

And the scheme Newsom just signed left President Trump holding one card California can’t touch.

Newsom Aims a 25% Tax at Every ICE Bed in California

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 1633, a law that slaps a 25% tax on the gross income of every private detention facility in the state.

Newsom didn’t bother dressing up the motive. “If we can’t kick out private facilities, we’ll go after their profits,” he said in a press release.

Read that line twice. The Governor says “profits,” but the bill taxes gross income, which means Sacramento takes a quarter off the top before a contractor pays a single guard, cook, or nurse.

According to Department of Homeland Security reporting cited by Fox News, California is home to eight ICE detention facilities, and private companies operate all of them. The GEO Group owns five. Imperial Valley Gateway Center LLC owns one. DHS bought the other two over the summer, and CoreCivic runs them under contracts that stretch through 2027 and 2029.

So the tax lands on every single place in California where ICE holds illegal aliens.

And the money doesn’t go to roads or schools. The bill’s language steers the revenue into something called the “Due Process for All Fund,” set aside for immigration-related services. Sacramento wants a cut of every dollar spent detaining illegal aliens, and it plans to hand that cut right back to the other side of the fight.

The law doesn’t kick in until the summer of 2028, the final year of President Trump’s second term. Newsom signed it alongside 20 other bills, including a ban on what he called “the Orwellian practice of using shock gloves in enforcement activity.”

“We may not be able to dictate federal immigration policy, but we can make clear that activities taking place in California will be subject to California law,” Newsom said.

Fox News Digital asked the Governor’s office for comment and didn’t immediately hear back.

Hans von Spakovsky Spots the Door Sacramento Left Open

Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at Advancing American Freedom, told Fox News Digital exactly what he thinks Newsom is up to.

“It’s very clear that there’s only one purpose to this California gigantic tax increase, and that is to make sure that the federal government cannot find any private property owners, any private contractors in California that are willing to lease space to the federal government,” Spakovsky said.

But Spakovsky also laid out the card President Trump still holds.

“The alternative for the federal government is to look at all the different federal properties that the government actually owns out there, over which neither Newsom or anybody else in California can impose any kind of tax, and see if any of those federal facilities can be converted to being a detention facility,” he said.

That could mean warehouses. It could mean office space. Uncle Sam owns plenty of both in California, and Newsom can’t send a tax bill to any of it.

The stakes run well past one state. “Currently ICE has about enough detention space for about sixty-six thousand aliens,” Spakovsky said, calling that figure “the full size of the federal government’s detention capacity.” Knock eight facilities offline and the whole national system feels the squeeze.

And if federal buildings in California come up short, Spakovsky has a second move ready.

“I’d go to Arizona. I’d potentially go to Nevada. I’d go to other states where they might be eager for federal government money and the increased employment from private contractors hiring people to work on these facilities,” he said.

Think about what that means for the Californians who work those jobs today. Newsom’s tax may ship their paychecks across the state line while the deportations roll on anyway.

The Ninth Circuit Already Told Newsom No Once

Anybody who has watched Newsom for a while has seen this movie before.

In 2019, he signed AB 32, an outright ban on private detention facilities in California. The GEO Group and the federal government sued. In 2022, a full panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, hardly a conservative bench, struck the ban down 8-3 under the Supremacy Clause.

Courthouse News reported the majority’s reasoning at the time: “If California could not prohibit ICE from hiring a particular private detention operator by imposing licensing requirements, it surely cannot regulate private detention operators out of existence through a direct ban.”

So Sacramento swapped the ban for a tax and hoped nobody would notice the family resemblance. Newsom’s own press release gives the game away. “If we can’t kick out private facilities” is a confession that the goal never changed.

American law has dealt with this trick for more than two centuries. In McCulloch v. Maryland in 1819, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote that “the power to tax involves the power to destroy,” and the Supreme Court refused to let a state tax a federal operation out of existence. As recently as 2022, in United States v. Washington, the justices threw out a state law that singled out federal contractors for worse treatment.

Now, to be fair, no court has ruled on AB 1633 yet. The bill’s text covers state and local contracts too, and California’s lawyers will lean hard on that detail. But a law whose author announces he’s going after the eight facilities ICE depends on starts that fight in a deep hole.

There’s also the plain old tax problem. Governments don’t create wealth. They move it around. A 25% levy on a federal contractor ends up on the invoice, and the folks who pay that invoice are taxpayers in all 50 states. A retired couple in Tennessee would chip in so California can bankroll services for people ICE is trying to remove.

And voters already settled the underlying question. President Trump ran in 2024 on mass deportations and won. A Harvard CAPS/Harris survey of 1,725 registered voters taken in late spring of 2026 found 56% support deporting all illegal aliens, including 53% of independents. Eighty percent back removing those who have committed crimes.

Newsom is fighting that mandate with the state tax code because he lost at the ballot box and lost in the courtroom.

Open-borders politicians in other blue states are surely watching. If a 25% tax survives in California, expect copycat bills wherever Democrats hold a statehouse, each one built to starve immigration enforcement of beds while claiming to respect federal authority.

But the clock works against Sacramento here. The tax doesn’t bite until 2028, which hands the Trump administration nearly two years to line up federal property, sign leases in Arizona and Nevada, and walk into court with Newsom’s own words as Exhibit A.

Newsom wanted to go after profits. He may wind up handing a few thousand jobs to his neighbors and another Supremacy Clause lesson to his lawyers.

Sources:

Fox News, “Newsom slaps 25% tax on private detention centers in sweeping pushback against key Trump policy”

Courthouse News Service, “En banc Ninth Circuit guts California ban on for-profit detention facilities”

US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, GEO Group, Inc v. Newsom

US Supreme Court, United States v. Washington (2022)

Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll, survey of 1,725 registered voters, 2026