California lawmakers are one step closer to making hundreds of millions of taxpayer-funded home loans available to residents living in the country illegally.
Democrats on the California Senate Appropriations Committee unanimously approved AB 1840 to move forward on Thursday, according to an official vote tally of the legislation. The bill has one last chance to be struck down on the Senate floor, where Democrats wield majority power, before it lands on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk.
The legislation seeks to amend the California Dream For All Shared Appreciation Loan program, an initiative launched last year that provides first-time homebuyers with a loan of up to 20% of the house’s purchase price for down payment or closing cost. If passed and signed into law, illegal migrants living in California would be eligible to apply for a piece of the pie.
“Once again, California has chosen to prioritize illegal immigration and fiscal irresponsibility over the needs of its citizens, all while facing a $60 billion deficit that will ultimately be passed onto taxpayers,” San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond said in a statement provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“California is in dire financial straits, yet lawmakers continue to prioritize programs that incentivize illegal immigration and strain local resources,” Desmond continued. “Expanding this program to include illegal immigrants is not just another handout — it’s a massive overreach that shifts the financial burden onto law-abiding taxpayers.”
These taxpayer-funded home loans are interest-free and borrowers are not required to dole out monthly payments, making the program incredibly popular with California residents.
When applications for the $300 million program first opened up in May 2023 — offering interest-free loans to roughly 2,300 middle and lower-income homebuyers — the money ran out in less than two weeks, according to the LA Times. State officials have since tightened eligibility for the program, requiring that at least one of the applicants be a first-generation home buyer and replacing the first-come-first-serve model with a lottery.
Despite California struggling to cope with a budget deficit in the tens of billions of dollars, and availability for the program incredibly tight already, one state lawmaker felt the loan program wasn’t inclusive enough.
Assemblymember Joaquin Arambula, a Democrat from Fresno, first introduced AB 1840 in January, with the goal of broadening the definition of “first-time home buyer” to include illegal immigrants. The lawmaker argued in March that the “social and economic benefits of homeownership should be available to everyone,” according to a local news KTLA. Arambula did not immediately respond to the the DCNF’s request for comment.
The legislation has since easily passed the Democrat-dominated California Assembly and sailed through the Senate Appropriations Committee — with opposition exclusively relegated to GOP lawmakers.
“California’s budget deficit continues to grow and Democratic lawmakers are so out of touch with everyday Californians that they and are quite literally taking money away from law-abiding citizens, their own constituents, and handing it over as a free gift to people who broke federal law to cross the border illegally,” California Sen. Brian Dahle stated to the DCNF.
“There’s no accountability and transparency when it comes to the Democrats’ spending sprees, and it’s unfortunate because many Californians see homeownership as nothing more than an illusion at this point,” Dahle continued.
California is experiencing a massive budget shortfall.
State lawmakers in June approved a budget that slashed spending and temporarily raised taxes on businesses in an effort to shore up a nearly $50 billion budget deficit, according to the Associated Press. The dire financial situation marks a far cry from the more than $100 billion surplus the state enjoyed roughly two years ago, but those revenue spikes proved only temporary as rising unemployment, inflation and a slowing of the tech industry has battered California pocketbooks.
The state’s deficit was roughly $ 32 billion in 2023, which grew to more than $46 billion earlier this year and is now around $60 billion, according to California Republicans — drawing questions as to why lawmakers would open up a highly-coveted loan program to a large swath of the population that does not hold legal status.
Nearly two million illegal migrants live in California, according to data published by the Pew Research Center in July.
It’s not immediately clear if Newsom will sign the legislation. When reached for comment, a spokesperson said the governor’s office does not typically comment on pending legislation, adding that the governor would “evaluate the legislation on its merits” should it reach his desk.
Approval of AB 1840 came on the same day that Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign announced she would be unveiling a proposal similar to her home state’s current program: $25,000 in down payment support for first-time homebuyers, including greater support for first-generation homeowners.
It’s not clear if the proposal from Harris — who has recently attempted to cast herself as more of a border hawk — would explicitly exclude illegal immigrants. Her campaign did not respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.
California Republicans, in the meantime, are left balking at their own state’s legislative actions.
“Many legal California residents can’t afford a home in their own state,” California Sen. Brian Jones said to the DCNF. He is one of only two GOP members on the Senate Appropriations Committee.
“Instead of addressing the housing crisis, radical Democrat lawmakers want to help illegal immigrants buy houses with the gift of taxpayer funds,” Jones continued. “With a $62 billion budget deficit, we need to focus on preserving essential government functions, not unfair political spending for those here illegally.”
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“So we’re going to have an order on that pretty soon – we can’t do that to our farmers and leisure too, hotels, we’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”
President Donald Trump said Thursday that changes are coming to his aggressive immigration policies after complaints from farmers and business owners.
“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump wrote in a social media post Thursday morning. “In many cases the Criminals allowed into our Country by the VERY Stupid Biden Open Borders Policy are applying for those jobs. This is not good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!”
Later Thursday, Trump made it clear that businesses need workers.
“Our farmers are being hurt badly. They have very good workers – they’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be great. And we’re going to have to do something about that,” the president said.
He added: “We can’t take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don’t have, maybe, what they’re supposed to have.”
Just how Trump may change his approach to immigration enforcement remains unclear, but he said he wants to help farmers and business owners.
“You go into a farm and you look and people, they’ve been there for 20 or 25 years and they work great and the owner of the farm loves them and you’re supposed to throw them out. You know what happens? They end up hiring the criminals that have come in, the murderers from prisons and everything else,” Trump said.
Trump said changes would be coming soon, but gave little detail on how policies could change.
“So we’re going to have an order on that pretty soon – we can’t do that to our farmers and leisure too, hotels, we’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”
In a later post on Truth Social, Trump said illegal immigration had destroyed American institutions.
“Biden let 21 Million Unvetted, Illegal Aliens flood into the Country from some of the most dangerous and dysfunctional Nations on Earth — Many of them Rapists, Murderers, and Terrorists. This tsunami of Illegals has destroyed Americans’ Public Schools, Hospitals, Parks, Community Resources, and Living Conditions,” the president wrote. “They have stolen American Jobs, consumed BILLIONS OF DOLLARS in Free Welfare, and turned once idyllic Communities, like Springfield, Ohio, into Third World Nightmares.”
He added that deportations would continue: “I campaigned on, and received a Historic Mandate for, the largest Mass Deportation Program in American History. Polling shows overwhelming Public Support for getting the Illegals out, and that is exactly what we will do. As Commander-in-Chief, I will always protect and defend the Heroes of ICE and Border Patrol, whose work has already resulted in the Most Secure Border in American History. Anyone who assaults or attacks an ICE or Border Agent will do hard time in jail. Those who are here illegally should either self deport using the CBP Home App or, ICE will find you and remove you. Saving America is not negotiable!”
For years, Canada’s political class sold us on the idea that carbon taxes were clever policy. Not just a tool to cut emissions, but a fair one – tax the polluters, then cycle the money back to regular folks, especially those with thinner wallets.
It wasn’t a perfect system. The focus-group-tested line embraced for years by the Trudeau Liberals made no sense at all: we’re taxing you so we can put more money back in your pocketbooks. What the hell? If you care so much about my taxes being low, just cut them already. Somehow, it took years and years of this line being repeated for its internal contradiction to become evident to all.
Yet, even many strategic conservative minds could see the thinking had internal logic. You could sell it at a town hall. As an editorial team member at an influential news organization when B.C. got its carbon tax in 2008, I bought into the concept too.
And now? That whole model has been thrown overboard, by the very parties had long defended it with a straight face and an arch tone. In both Ottawa and Victoria in 2025, progressive governments facing political survival abandoned the idea of climate policy as a matter of fairness, opting instead for tactical concessions meant to blunt the momentum of their foes.
The result: lower-income Canadians who had grown accustomed to carbon tax rebates as a dependable backstop are waking up to find the support gone. And higher earners? They just got a tidy little gift from the state.
The betrayal is worse in B.C.
This new chart from economist Ken Peacock tells the story. He shared it last week at the B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
Ken-Peacock- B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
What is shows is that scrapping the carbon tax means the poor are poorer. The treasury is emptier.
What about the rich?
Yup, you guessed it: richer.
Scrubbing the B.C. consumer carbon tax leaves the lowest earning 20 percent of households $830 per year poorer, while the top one-fifth gain $959.
“Climate leader” British Columbia’s approach was supposed to be the gold standard: a revenue-neutral carbon tax, accepted by industry, supported by voters, and engineered to send the right price signal without growing the size of government.
That pact broke somewhere along the way.
Instead of returning the money, the provincial government slowly transformed the tax into a $2 billion annual cash cow. And when Mark Carney won the federal election, B.C. Premier David Eby, boxed in by his own pledge, scrapped the tax like a man dropping ballast from a sinking balloon. Gone. No replacement. No protections for those who need them most.
Filling the gas tank, on the other hand, is noticeably cheaper. Of course, if you can’t afford a car that might not be apparent.
Spare a thought for the climate activists who spent 15 years flogging this policy, only to watch it get tossed aside like a stack of briefing notes on a Friday afternoon.
Who could not conclude that the environmental left has been played. For a political movement that prides itself on idealism, it’s a brutal lesson in realpolitik: when power’s on the line, principles are negotiable.
But here’s the thing: maybe the carbon tax model deserved a rethink. Maybe it’s time for a grown-up look at what actually works
With B.C. now reviewing its CleanBC policies, here’s a basic question: what’s working, and what’s not?
A lot of emission reductions in this province didn’t come from government fiat. They were the result of business-led innovation: more efficient technology, cleaner fuels, and capital discipline.
That, plus a hefty dose of offshoring. We’ve pushed our industrial emissions onto other jurisdictions, then shipped the finished goods back without attaching any climate cost. This contradiction particularly helped to fuel the push to dump carbon pricing as a failed solution.
The progressives’ choice was made once the anti-tax arguments could no longer be refuted: to limit losses it would be necessary to deep six an unpopular strand of the overall carbon strategy. This, to save the rest. That’s why policies like the federal emissions cap haven’t also been abandoned.
To give another example, it’s also why British Columbia’s aviation sector is in a flap over the issue of sustainable aviation fuel. Despite years of aspirational policy, low emissions jet fuel blends remain more scarce than a long-haul cabin upgrade. The policy’s designers correctly anticipated that refiners would never be able to meet the imposed demand, and so as an alternative they provided a complex carbon credit trading scheme that will make the cost of flying more expensive. For those with a choice, nearby airport hubs in the United States where these policies do not apply will become an attractive alternative, while remote communities that have no choice in the matter will simply have to eat the cost. (Needless to say, if emissions reduction is your goal this policy isn’t needed anyways, since the decisions that matter in reducing global aviation emissions aren’t made in B.C. and never will be.)
I’m not showing up to bash those who have been genuinely trying to figure things out, and found themselves in a world of policy that is more complicated and unpredictable than they realized. Simply put, the chapter is closing on an era of energy policy naïveté.
The brutally honest action by Eby and Carney to eject carbon taxes for their own political survival could be read as a signal that it’s now okay to have an honest public conversation. Let’s insist on that. For years now, debate has been constrained in part by a particular form of linguistic tyranny, awash in terminology designed to cow the questioner into silence. “So you have an issue with clean policies, do you? What kind of dirty reprobate are you?” “Only a monster doesn’t want their aviation fuel to be sustainable.” Etc. Now is the moment to move on from that, and widen the field of discourse.
Ditching bad policy is also a signal that just maybe a better approach is to start by embracing a robust sense of the possibilities for energy to improve lives and empower all of the solutions needed for tomorrow’s problems. Because that’s the only way the conversation will ever get real.
Slogans, wildly aspirational goal setting and the habit of refusing to acknowledge how the world really works have been getting us nowhere. Petroleum products will continue to obey Yergin’s Law: oil always gets to market. China and India will grow their economies using reliable energy they can afford, having recently approved the construction of the most new coal power plants in a decade amid energy security concerns. Japan, which has practically worn itself out pleading for natural gas from Canada, isn’t waiting for the help of last-finishing nice guys to guarantee energy security: today, they are buying 8% of their LNG imports from the evil Putin regime.
Meanwhile, we’re in the worst of both worlds: our courageous carbon tax policy that was positioned as trailblazing not just for B.C. residents but for the world as a whole – climate leadership! – is gone, the poorest are puzzling over why things feel even more expensive, and nobody knows what comes next.
Ken-Peacock- B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
