After a tumultuous week that ended in Eric Swalwell’s spectacular political collapse, billionaire Tom Steyer has emerged as the leading Democratic candidate in the California governor’s race. The uber-progressive Steyer is the founder of Farallon Capital Management, a San Francisco-based hedge fund that managed more than $36 billion in assets at the time he stepped down in 2012 to focus on environmental activism.
He also ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. By the time he suspended his campaign in February 2020, he had spent roughly $345 million of his own money on the race.
How far-left is Steyer? Well, according to Fox News’ Bill Melugin, he just released “an immigration platform that is radically left of Gov. Newsom.”
In a social media post titled, How California Can Put ICE in Jail, Steyer outlined his plan to abolish ICE which he claimed “is acting like a criminal organization, carrying out indiscriminate racial profiling and using violence, intimidation, terrorism, and the murder of Americans to extend Trump’s rule by fear.
“To stop [ICE’s] authoritarian takeover, we must counter ICE head-on,” Steyer said, “and go after both their agents on the streets and their leadership within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
“How do we do this?” he asked. “The same way we took on the mob. Put ICE agents and their leadership in jail for their crimes, because that’s how you take on a violent extremist group and win.”
Steyer outlined a five-point plan that includes banning law enforcement profiling, empowering California’s attorney general to prosecute ICE agents and leadership, creating a state investigative unit to gather evidence, expanding taxpayer-funded legal defense for detainees, and launching a statewide “Know Your Rights” campaign — while also encouraging Californians to “take matters into our own hands.”
Rather than stopping at sanctuary policies, he appears willing to undermine U.S. immigration law altogether and treat federal agents as the criminals.
In other words, Steyer isn’t just proposing resistance to federal immigration enforcement; he’s advocating a complete inversion of it. Under his framework, those enforcing U.S. immigration law would be treated as criminals, while those violating it would be shielded, subsidized, and legally supported by the state.
That’s not merely an expansion of so-called “sanctuary” policies — it’s an attempt to nullify federal authority altogether. By empowering state officials to prosecute federal agents and constructing a taxpayer-funded apparatus to counter ICE at every turn, Steyer is effectively proposing that California operate in open defiance of federal law.
The implications of this approach are difficult to ignore. It raises fundamental questions about the limits of state power, the rule of law, and what happens when a state government decides it can override federal enforcement it disagrees with.
As Melugin notes in a separate post that, as progressive as Gov. Newsom is, he “has never suggested abolishing ICE, he allows CA state prisons to cooperate with ICE and honor ICE detainers when illegal aliens are released from prison, and he has vetoed bills from CA Democrats that sought to end that prison cooperation.”
If voters view Steyer’s positions on illegal immigration as extreme, they may want to consider what he has in store on his signature issue: climate policy.
While all of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates moved to the left during the primary, Tom Steyer stood out as one of the most extreme. Despite his lavish spending, he never managed to break into the top tier of contenders. Even in his current race, he was not taken particularly seriously by California voters until Eric Swalwell exited the contest, leaving voters to choose between Steyer and another deeply flawed candidate, former Rep. Katie Porter.
Nancy Pelosi once said that Democrats would vote for anyone with a “D” after their name. And that may be true. Certainly some former Swalwell voters, particularly the most progressive among them, will back Steyer. And some will back Porter.
But others, recognizing the state’s significant decline after years of liberal governance, may gravitate toward one of the two Republican candidates: former Fox News host Steve Hilton, who had been ahead of Swalwell in polling, and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, who trailed only slightly prior to Swalwell’s fall from grace.
California will hold a “jungle primary” in the race on June 2, with all candidates — regardless of party — competing on a single ballot. The top two finishers will advance to a November runoff.
We’ll see what happens.
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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