Newsom's Campus-Jobs Veto Protects Lawyers, Not Undocumented Students

His second veto in two years keeps roughly 80,000 undocumented students at California's public colleges off campus payrolls.

Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed Assembly Bill 713 on September 20, 2026. The bill would have told the University of California, California State University and the state's community colleges that a missing federal work permit can't be the reason a student is refused a campus job, the Los Angeles Times reported. It was his second veto of such a bill in two years.

Candice Phan, president of the UC Student Assn. and a UC Davis student, told the Times that the hiring ban shuts undocumented students out of paid internships, out of work as research and teaching assistants, and out of the student government seats that carry a stipend. Those aren't side gigs. That's the first rung of an academic career, and it's closed to a student who's already paying California tuition.

The governor's stated reason is legal exposure. In his veto message he cited “potential criminal and civil liability for state employees,” and wrote that the federal courts have to settle the legality of the theory behind the bill before the state acts, the Times reported.

That's caution with a bill attached, and the students are the ones who got it.

The objection deserves to be stated at full strength, because it isn't frivolous. The 1986 federal hiring ban, 8 U.S.C. 1324a, makes it a crime for an employer to knowingly hire workers without authorization, and in 2024 both UC and Cal State warned lawmakers that campuses could face criminal charges, civil fines and the loss of federal contracts. The bill rests on a reading from UCLA law professors Ahilan Arulanantham and Hiroshi Motomura, co-directors of the law school's Miñana Family Center for Immigration Law and Policy, that the 1986 law was aimed at employers and never reached state governments, the Times reported. Untested theories do lose.

This one has already been to court, though, and UC is the side that lost. State appellate judges held last year that the university system's refusal to hire students without work permits “facially discriminates based on immigration status,” and they ordered UC to take the policy back up; the California Supreme Court declined to hear the system's appeal, the Times reported. UC hasn't changed the policy.

So “wait for the courts” has a factual problem. A court ruled. Nothing moved. Arulanantham, who represented plaintiffs in the suit against UC, told the Times the veto was misguided. “Rather than stand with undocumented students, the governor asks for another suit,” he said.

The other thing the veto buys is nothing. California is already a defendant: the Times reported that the Justice Department has sued the state and 20 others over in-state tuition for undocumented students, and that courts have blocked those tuition laws in five states. Newsom's own veto message describes a federal government attacking California's public universities and terrorizing immigrant communities. A governor who believes that, and then asks those same federal courts to go first, is telling students to wait for a rescue he just said isn't coming.

The scale here is small enough to be embarrassing. Between 2,000 and 4,000 undocumented students attend UC, a system that enrolls nearly 301,000. About 9,500 attend Cal State, out of 471,000. Roughly 70,000 are in the community colleges. Neither UC nor Cal State took a position on this year's bill, the Times reported. The systems whose lawyers are being protected didn't ask for the protection.

Assemblymember José Luis Solache Jr. (D-Lynwood) wrote the bill and can write it again. At a September 4, 2026 rally at the UCLA Labor Center near MacArthur Park, he made the argument the governor still hasn't answered: “The safest place for our undocumented students to be at work is on campus.”

Source: latimes.com, retrieved September 21, 2026.