Protestors rally against ICE at the San Francisco Police Department headquarters on March 25. A bill from Assembly Member Mia Bonta to protect workers at immigrant support centers from online harassment could also infringe on press freedoms.

Demonstrators protest ICE in Torrance (Los Angeles County) in November. The ICE surge in Minneapolis started after YouTube videos raised allegations of a fraud scheme with state childcare funding among Somali immigrants in Minnesota. Critics say Bonta’s bill targets the YouTuber, Nick Shirley.

The political theorist George Kateb put it well when he said that the First Amendment is most valuable as a protection when expression is “worthless or harmful.”

To put up with and support free speech or press freedom is not for the faint of heart, especially when one finds oneself in someone’s crosshairs. But the more vexatious the speech or the press is, especially to powerful people and government officials, the more valuable free speech and a free press are in a democracy.

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The temptations to silence or shut down speech, or punish journalists, have been present from the start of the republic, never more so than today. And the tendency to give in to that temptation is great even in the most progressive and otherwise tolerant places.

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One example of that is a bill introduced in the California Assembly by Mia Bonta, D-Alameda, the wife of state Attorney General Rob Bonta. Titled “Privacy for Immigration Service Providers,” Assembly Bill 2624 is an understandable response to a real........

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