Democrat Jesse Samuel Gabriel, 43, a second-term California State Assembly member from the San Fernando Valley, has authored more than 40 bills and chairs the powerful Assembly Budget Committee.
But Gabriel is a man of contradictions:
He’s an American constitutional rights lawyer and rising progressive star who has fought for gun control and against violence, hate crimes, and the deportation of dreamers.
His 2025 Assembly Budget Bill 227 funds provisions of his Assembly Bill 549 that could enshrine national police militarization, target immigrants for deportation, and empower state violence against sex workers and sex trafficking victims.
Could it all just be a big misunderstanding?
Kind of.
AB549, Gabriel’s new sporting events bill, is founded on a tired old lie: Every year, law enforcement uses long-disproven claims of sex trafficking at the Super Bowl to justify mass arrests of sex workers and clients.
Sporting events do not cause trafficking. They never have. Even the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women has debunked this myth.
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Yet Gabriel’s AB549 insists that we must fight human trafficking at 2026 FIFA World Cup games, Super Bowl LXI 2027, the Summer Olympic Games 2028, and the Paralympic Games 2028.
(The bill doesn’t mention next year’s Super Bowl LX, which will be hosted by San Francisco.)
AB549 is part of a multi-decade government disinformation campaign renaming sex work as sex trafficking, human trafficking, and terrorism. What they call sex trafficking stings are, in reality, prostitution stings.
A couple things you should know about “services for victims of human trafficking:”
A recent investigative report detailed how Homeland Security agents bought hand jobs before “rescuing” massage parlor workers by arresting them for prostitution.
In the last quarter century, trafficking arrests have spanned everything from police posing as fictitious children online to catch predators to arrests of sex workers who were just doing their jobs.
The US government invests billions in anti-trafficking dollars at the federal, state, and local level in activities ranging from the useless to the should-be-illegal. It doesn’t help people.
Renaming sex work as trafficking and terrorism has always been a money grab.
Gabriel’s budget bill, AB227, sets aside $17 million for the Office of Emergency Services to spend on “services for victims of human trafficking.” What this really means is that under AB549, OES would spend $17M arresting and deporting sex workers.
State Senator Scott Wiener ascended to chair the Senate Budget Committee in 2024. Wiener introduced a 2025 budget bill (SB65) that includes similar “human trafficking” provisions.
Renaming sex work as sex trafficking as terrorism is also gaslighting campaign that has Americans cowed, scared, and willing to give up their constitutional rights.
During the run up to Super Bowl LVI 2022 in Los Angeles, the Sheriff’s Department, together with the FBI, Homeland Security, and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (a conservative values group formerly known as Morality in Media, which aims to eradicate all sex work) mounted Operation Reclaim and Rebuild, its claimed mission “combating human trafficking.”
Sure enough, in the week after the Super Bowl, LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva trotted out a slew of misleading claims about his department’s imagined success in “stopping trafficking.”
In reality, though, according to data released by LASD itself, the vast majority of arrests were of sex workers and clients—mainly misdemeanor cases of either loitering for prostitution or attempting to purchase sex.
At the end of the week, 214 people were arrested for allegedly selling sex and 201 people were arrested for allegedly trying to pay for sex. Villanueva had to stretch for these numbers: Many arrests were miles away in Santa Barbara or San Bernardino, or at the other end of California in San Francisco or Fresno—arrests completely unconnected with the Super Bowl.
How many trafficking victims were saved? After stings costing millions in taxpayer dollars—millions diverted from stopping actual violent crime—none. This work is harmful and ineffective.
Gabriel’s money grab goes one step further. AB549 proposes that OES use anti-trafficking funds for a Large Stadium Initiative’s “federal National Special Security Event planning and preparedness” in Los Angeles.
Large Stadium Initiative resources would be spent on anti-trafficking national special security and, vaguely, “Any other safety issue that may arise at a national-level sporting event.”
Excuse me, but who thinks giving LAPD and LASD a mandate and national free reign is a good idea? This attempt at guardrail-free militarization is bone chilling. The bill’s undefined terms also invite more proliferation of doublespeak, say like renaming loitering as terrorism. Ever loitered?
Elected officials often spend more time fundraising than legislating. They use vague language like AB549’s to create slush funds for paying back favors. Maybe Gabriel traded the cow for magic beans.
Maybe. It’s hard to ignore the way “Any other safety issue that may arise” dovetails neatly with the fascist new border policies that held a Canadian journalist in a bare ICE kennel for two weeks without representation.
He’s a constitutional lawyer with degrees from Berkeley and Harvard. Gabriel is no dummy.
If his bill passes, the stateside 2026 World Cup promises to serve as ground zero for international incidents en masse.
Readers can comment on the bill here.
With a day job in nonprofit strategy consultation, Megan Hobza has reported on culture and regional news in Southern California for more than three decades. She is the former executive editor of hyper-local Sustainable City News in Whittier
