A father taking out the trash in front of his home after 10 p.m. A teacher giving a childhood friend a ride home. A married couple out in their neighborhood. A young man washing his clothes at the neighborhood laundromat. Each of these actions has been used by a California law enforcement agency to add a person to a gang database or gang injunction or to arrest them because being a “gang member” made these everyday activities illegal.
These aren’t isolated cases. They reflect a broader pattern of government overreach. For decades, California has allowed vague allegations of gang involvement to justify policing that sidesteps our most basic constitutional protections. People are flagged and tracked not for crimes, but for where they live, what they wear, or who they know.
Now, the Trump administration is using this flawed playbook on a national scale. Using the centuries-old Alien Enemies Act, the administration is pushing to deport individuals without hearings, using gang labels, often pulled from these same gang databases, to justify bypassing the Constitution entirely. This isn’t about safety. It’s about power. It’s about testing how far executive authority can go when fear replaces facts.
These flawed tools are now central to the Trump administration’s campaign to undermine the Constitution. And if you see Trump as a threat to democracy, then California’s gang laws should trouble you too, because they’ve used the same logic for years. It is time to stop using gang allegations as a loophole to bypass the constitutional protections that apply to everyone. These exceptions undermine the rule of law and erode the very rights our justice system is built on.
The Legislature must establish real oversight of gang databases. These systems allow police and sheriff departments to label people as gang members based on nothing more than wearing a sports team logo or being seen in a certain neighborhood. In 2016, the state tried to regulate the largest gang database, CalGang. However, rather than complying with new rules, most law enforcement agencies stopped using CalGang and created new, internal databases that operate without accountability. Despite decades of law enforcement leaders insisting they need shared gang databases, as soon as they were required to back up their entries with actual evidence, they decided it wasn’t worth doing. The Legislature should shut down these shadow databases. Agencies should either use CalGang or no database at all. We can’t afford to allow sloppy gang allegations to fall into the hands of Trump’s deportation machine.
County district attorneys should dismiss all remaining gang injunctions. Gang injunctions are civil lawsuits against gangs that, for practical purposes, put individuals on probation solely because they are alleged gang members. These injunctions duplicate probation agreements commonly called “gang-terms probation,” which contain terms like prohibiting certain clothes or being in public near other alleged gang members. Courts have repeatedly found gang injunctions unconstitutional, and nearly every jurisdiction in California has abandoned them. However, a few district attorneys still pursue these cases. While some in law enforcement argue that gang injunctions are just another tool in their toolbox, it is the same tool as gang-terms probation. The difference is that gang injunctions don’t require proof that a person committed a crime. Gang injunctions’ only purpose is to evade the constitutional protections guaranteed in the criminal court system. It’s time to end their use entirely.
District attorneys should stop prosecuting crimes under California’s Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention (STEP) Act, and the Legislature should repeal it. Enacted in 1988, the STEP Act allows prosecutors to add extra years to a person’s sentence for a gang-related crime, even though the underlying crime is already being charged and punished. Ending gang enhancements was one of the things that progressive prosecutors got right. If three people steal a person’s wallet at gunpoint, they should be prosecuted for armed robbery. If a person shoots into a crowd, that person should be prosecuted for multiple counts of attempted murder. But no one should serve an additional 10 years because they grew up in a certain neighborhood or hung around with a certain kind of person. The Legislature made some progress on this issue in 2021 by revising the STEP Act. This revision limited gang enhancements without affecting public safety, and is proof that we do not need them at all.
California has the experience and responsibility to lead by example. The same unchecked powers being tested at the federal level—surveillance without cause, punishment without trial, and guilt by association—have long existed here under the banner of gang suppression policing. If Californians are serious about resisting authoritarianism and defending constitutional democracy, we can start by dismantling the law enforcement practices that inspired these federal abuses.
We cannot fight authoritarianism while clinging to its tactics.
Sean Garcia-Leys is executive director of the Peace and Justice Law Center, Orange County’s only public interest law firm dedicated to public safety and human rights
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