SACRAMENTO—In a landmark step toward protecting children at risk of family separation, Governor Gavin Newsom on October 12 signed Assembly Bill 495 (AB 495), the Family Preparedness Plan Act of 2025, into law. The bill provides families—especially those vulnerable to immigration enforcement or other sudden crises—with stronger, clearer, and more accessible legal pathways to ensure their children are cared for by trusted adults if parents become unavailable, while also strengthening the existing Childcare Safety Plan already in use across several counties statewide.
Before AB 495, parents who wanted to make sure their children would be cared for in an emergency faced a confusing and often intimidating process. Many had to rely on complicated legal documents that schools, doctors, or agencies might not accept, leaving children at risk of being placed in temporary government care or separated from their immediate or extended families. For those seeking stronger legal protection, the only option was to navigate costly, time-consuming court petitions that often required disclosing private family information—including immigration status—adding fear and uncertainty to an already stressful situation.
AB 495 streamlines this process, reinforcing the Childcare Safety Plan (CSP) and giving parents clearer, more accessible legal tools to protect their children. The law takes effect on January 1, 2026.
“This is a victory for every parent who has ever lived with the fear of being separated from their child,” said Tanya Harmony Ridino, Founding Attorney of the Childcare Safety Plan Coalition. “AB 495 honors years of local advocacy and turns hard lessons learned from our community into a statewide reform. This is a win for dignity, compassion, and ensuring no child is left behind when systems fail their parents.”
First developed in Santa Cruz and Monterey counties in 2017, the CSP was created by the Childcare Safety Plan Coalition, a network of local attorneys, social service providers, and community advocates dedicated to protecting children from unnecessary family separation. The model emerged as these partners recognized the urgent need for a simple, accessible legal tool that would allow parents to delegate care for their children in an emergency.
AB 495 builds on the CSP, aligning state law with a proven local model that hundreds of families have benefited from throughout California. The bilingual, easy-to-use CSP empowers parents to legally designate trusted caregivers through existing power of attorney provisions in California’s probate code.
Specifically, the new law strengthens that framework by expanding who can be authorized under the Caregiver Authorization Affidavit (CAA), requiring schools and healthcare providers to honor those designations, and creating a confidential joint guardianship process that lets parents share responsibility without giving up their rights. The law also closes key privacy gaps by ensuring that schools and childcare programs cannot collect or share immigration status without a warrant.
Together, AB 495 and the CSP form a comprehensive safety net that keeps children safe, families intact, and communities stable by making it simpler, safer, and more dignified for parents to plan ahead, ensuring their children are cared for and loved, even when unexpected emergencies arise.
“For many immigrant parents, the law has never been written with their realities in mind,” said Paulina Moreno, a director at Community Action Board of Santa Cruz County and a longtime immigration advocate for family preparedness planning. “Even something as simple as authorizing a trusted relative to pick up your child from school can become a legal obstacle if your status is questioned. AB 495 levels the playing field. It gives families who are often under-resourced a clear, accessible, and confidential way to protect their children and make caregiving decisions without fear. This law recognizes that love and responsibility, not paperwork or citizenship, are what hold families together.”
OVERVIEW OF AB 495
Read on below to learn more about how AB 495 expands and strengthens both the CAA and guardianship process to support families’ caregiving choices:
- Expands the definition of “relative” under the CAA to include a larger and less formal group of kinship and community care for the child;
- Elevates use of the CAA as a temporary authorization to consent to certain school and medical decisions for the child and requires agencies to accept it;
- Provides for nomination of a joint guardian to share responsibility for the child if the parent is unavailable without relinquishing parental rights;
- Streamlines and ensures confidentiality of the joint guardianship process through the court;
AB 495 also protects family privacy and information regarding immigration status in schools and applies the same rules to childcare programs.
- Prohibits schools and childcare from collecting information regarding immigration status;
- Prohibits schools and childcare from disclosing information about children without a judicial warrant;
- Requires schools and childcare to report requests or attempts to gain information about children’s immigration status;
- Requires schools and childcare to maintain current emergency contact information and to first exhaust any parental instruction for the child’s care in the emergency contacts in the event the parent is unavailable to pick up the child;
- Requires the Attorney General’s office to develop model policies limiting assistance with immigration enforcement at schools and childcare programs, to publish such policies, and for the schools and childcare programs to adopt such policies and inform parents.
WHAT IS THE CSP?
These protections are strongest when paired with a CSP developed by the Childcare Safety Plan Coalition, which uses a train the trainer model and has helped hundreds of families in Santa Cruz, Monterey, San Benito and Alameda counties complete this document and provided peace of mind for parents.
The CSP remains the simplest and most accessible tool for implementing these new protections from AB 495. Available in English and Spanish, the CSP guides parents step-by-step through the process of naming a caregiver and completing necessary legal forms—helping families prepare thoughtfully and privately, without fear, stigma, or legal/government involvement.
Currently, the CSP is the only model of its kind which incorporates both a CAA and a Nomination of Guardianship form easily within its contents.
Uniformity in family emergency preparedness is critical to defuse the fear and confusion that has been rampant. The Childcare Safety Plan Coalition urges the California Attorney General’s to adopt the CSP as the statewide model for family preparedness. By integrating the CSP into official guidance, California can ensure every parents, regardless of income, language, or immigration status, has access to a simple, comprehensive plan that safeguards children, strengthens families and upholds the values of compassion and fairness that define our state.
For more information about AB 495.
For the full text of AB 495:
ABOUT THE CHILDCARE SAFETY PLAN COALITION
The Childcare Safety Plan (CSP) Coalition is a community-led partnership formed in Santa Cruz and Monterey counties in response to family separations that left children vulnerable when parents were detained or deported. Bringing together local attorneys, nonprofit leaders, and government representatives, the coalition developed the Childcare Safety Plan—a free, bilingual tool that helps families create a personalized plan to ensure their children’s care during emergencies. Today, the CSP Coalition continues to advocate for statewide adoption of this model so that every family in California can protect their children with dignity, privacy, and peace of mind.
Learn more at CommunityBridges.org/CSP.
