Kevin R. Johnson
Role at the time: Professor emeritus at the UC Davis School of Law, quoted in an Associated Press report
Response to this claim
First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said on September 29, 2026 that California has no jurisdiction to regulate federal agents and that he had advised the Department of Homeland Security to disregard AB 2760.
“The state has very limited, if any, powers in dictating to the federal government how its officers are armed”
Associated Press report on the signing, as published by PBS News. It gives the law's dates, the Justice Department study requirement, comments by Sharp-Collins, Sacramento County Sheriff Jim Cooper and UC Davis professor emeritus Kevin Johnson, and the earlier court ruling on California's mask law.
Archived copy (opens in a new tab)Why we used this label
Relative to the ban as applied to federal officers, Johnson predicts that courts will hold the state lacks the power to bind federal officers, which rejects the ban's federal application as beyond California's authority. He addresses only the power question. We used Condemned because he rejects the application as unenforceable, even while calling the laws well-intentioned. The closest competing label is Mixed or conditional, because he calls the laws well-intentioned and frames his conclusion as a prediction (likely), but he credits only the laws' purpose and rejects their application to federal officers.