A cross section of Southern California’s leading Democrats are spearheading an effort to prevent the U.S. Senate’s confirmation of Bill Essayli as the U.S. attorney for Central California.
Essayli, a former California Assemblyman and the one-time chief of staff to former San Bernardino Mayor John Valdivia, while establishing himself as a rock solid conservative Republican committed to tough ideological struggles in the face of overwhelming liberal opposition, is vehemently at odds with California’s predominant Democrats.
He was twice, in 2022 and 2024, chosen by the voters in the 63rd Assembly District to represent them, but was thwarted throughout his more than 25 months in office by the Democrats, who hold supermajorities in both of California’s legislative houses, from getting any of the bills he authored out of committee. In April, when President Donald Trump nominated him to be the U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California incorporating Orange, Riverside Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, Essayli resigned from the Assembly to accept the post.
Essayli went instantaneously from being an outcast in California’s lower legislative house to one of the most prestigious posts within the U.S. Justice System. California’s Central District is the most populous such judicial jurisdiction in the country, with almost 20 million people living within its confines. As U.S. Attorney, he supervises 263 lawyers and the complete support staff the offices entail in their work at the four federal courthouses located in Los Angeles along with the courthouses in Riverside, Santa Ana, Pasadena, Woodland Hills, and Santa Barbara.
While Essayli has been temporarily installed under 28 U.S.C. § 546, he is subject to being confirmed by the U.S. Senate. The Democratic Party enjoys dominance in California and in a handful of states, including New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, Washington and Oregon. Nevertheless, following the 2024 election it lost the White House and is the minority party in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Elements within the Democratic Party, however, remain determined to use whatever power remains to them to hold the Trump Administration in check.
Essayli served as an intern in the White House Counsel’s Office during the George W. Bush Administration and during the Obama Administration was hired as a deputy prosecutor with the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office. While Obama was yet president, he became an assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, remaining in that capacity while working out of both the Los Angeles and Riverside offices from October 2014 to February 2018. In that role, he was part of the team of prosecutors who prosecuted or pursued action with regard to Enrique Marquez Jr., Raheel Farook, Tatiana Farook, and Mariya Chernykh for the assistance they rendered Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik in carrying out the 2015 terrorist attack in San Berardino.
Essayli ran unsuccessfully for the California Assembly in 2018 against incumbent Democrat Sabrina Cervantes, who has since moved on to the California Senate, prior to his 2022 political comeback. He has long been perceived by the Democrats as an acerbic mouthpiece of the Republican opposition. Very early on in his tenure in the Assembly, the Democrats united in an effort to block virtually all of his legislation, using various means of preventing the bills he had authored from reaching the Assembly floor for a vote. By 2024, when he was seeking reelection, the Democrats, having thwarted all of his legislative attempts, then utilized their undercutting of him to caricaturize him as a lawmaker who had never authored a law. Despite that, he was reelected.
Shortly after Essayli was nominated to the U.S. attorney’s slot, Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, acutely conscious of the hostility his party had exhibited toward Essayli in the past and concerned about the hostility his party might have engendered in Essayli going forward remarked that the U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California “was powerless in the Assembly, and is using his Trump-bestowed job to settle scores.”
The campaign to defang Essayli has now evolved into an effort to prevent him from remaining for a full term as U.S. Attorney.
A website put together by Democratic Party activists, stopessayli.org, is the cornerstone of the effort to prevent Essayli’s confirmation in the U.S. Senate.
The website calls upon those who have reached it to “Stop Essayli. Protect Children. Defend Democracy.”
It states “Bill Essayli poses a clear and present danger to LGBTQ+ [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, queer plus] youth, immigrant communities, our environment, labor leaders, and the impartial administration of justice. Since being appointed interim U.S. Attorney, Essayli has weaponized the office for political gain—overturning a jury conviction of a sheriff’s deputy found guilty of excessive force, targeting SEIU [Service Employees International Union] California President David Huerta for standing with workers, politicizing the horrific Palm Springs bombings, and threatening local officials in Santa Ana with criminal prosecution for protecting immigrant communities. As Speaker Rivas put it, his “abuse of position is the mark of a small and petty man. Join us in mobilizing Californians to block his nomination.”
Claiming to be “backed by Californians who believe in real justice,” the website’s creators further maintain they are “supported by immigrant rights advocates, parents of LGBTQ+ youth, military veterans, legal experts, and thousands of concerned citizens. This growing coalition is united around a simple belief: people like Bill Essayli have no business occupying the US Attorney’s office.”
In addition to appealing to those advocating on behalf of illegal immigrants, those embracing alternative lifestyles; unionists, Democrats in general, those in favor of Essayli’s removal as the temporary U.S. Attorney and preventing his confirmation as permanent U.S. Attorney in the Central District of California also called upon environmentalists to join with them, maintaining he is “blocking regulators from reducing pollution in our environment on behalf of the fossil fuel industry.”
The website’s organizers call for those sharing their distaste for Essayli to email both of California’s U.S. Senators – senior senator, Alex Padilla, and junior senator, Adam Schiff – to ask them to oppose Essayli’s permanent appointment as U.S. attorney; to phone Padilla and Schiff in seeking the same outcome; to submit letters to newspapers advocating the U.S. Senate reject his appointment; to sign a petition being circulated that opposes Essayli’s appointment; to donate money to the effort to prevent his appointment; and to, on their own, get the word out that Essayli is a general no-goodnik.
Those seeking to block Essayli’s appointment have lambasted him as “a right-wing extremist.”
An examination of those militating against him, however, demonstrates that the “extremist” label is as applicable to them as to him, albeit from the opposite side of the political spectrum.
Two of Essayli’s positions with regard to issues that are featured in the ongoing culture war between conservatives and liberals along with Republican and Democrats – transsexual rights and illegal immigration – while hewing to the conservative/Republican side of the polemic, appear nonetheless less radical than what is being advocated by his avowed opponents.
Essayli appears to have gotten the goat of transsexual right advocates by his efforts, while in the Assembly, to bring forward two pieces of legislation, one, Assembly Bill 89, that would have required the California Interscholastic Federation to change its policies and prohibit an athlete who was male at birth from participating in a girls’ interscholastic sports team, and Assembly Bill 1314, which would give schools three days to notify parents in writing once a school employee learns a student is identifying as a gender that doesn’t align with their birth certificate or other official records. Both efforts came to naught in the Assembly, but he managed to raise awareness about the widespread acceptance of transgenderism in school districts throughout California, which in turn spawned policy changes within a number of school districts relating to parental notification when students have assumed a gender identity different than the one assigned them at birth. This resulted in legal challenges which were, in essence ultimately turned back and legislation giving students leeway to hide their gender reidentification from their parents, which is now being subject to legal challenge.
The degree to which Essayli is identified by the transsexual rights camp as an effective bulwark against their advocacy is evident in the website seeking his rejection as U.S. Attorney. In seeking to illustrate that Essayli represents “a clear and present danger to LGBTQ+ youth,” the website cites the somewhat dubious statistic that at present nearly 800,000 of the roughly 5.8 million kindergarten to 12th grade students enrolled in California’s public schools at present are transsexuals.
The website openly declared that there were “796,000+ Californian schoolchildren that Essayli would have ‘outed’ if his bill succeeded in the state legislature.”

Similarly, advocates for undocumented immigrants have an especial loathing for Essayli because of his family history.
In 1981, Essayli’s Lebanese parents were living in their native country in 1981, when fighting between Lebanese Christian militias and Palestinian insurgents intensified. The following year, the skirmishing erupted into a full-blown war, with forces that included the Palestinians and Lebanese Muslims, pan-Arabists, and leftists, backed by Syria and Iran, taking on the Christians, who had formed an alliance with Israel.
In 1983 the war moved on into the county’s mountain region and became general throughout the country. In October 1983, 241 U.S. Marines and 58 French military personnel along with six civilians were killed when two Islamic militants drove an explosive filled truck into the Marine compound in Beirut and detonated it.
At that time, despite the general circumstance in Lebanon, Essayli’s parents were able to leave the county and emigrate – legally – to the United States. This came despite their Islamic religious affiliation. That they, despite the circumstances pertaining to their status and the general atmosphere in the country at that time adhered to U.S. immigration law, in the minds of many, including Essayli’s opponents, confers on him a degree of moral authority in the enforcement of immigration law. For that reason, advocates of open borders, laissez faire immigration law enforcement, liberals and Democrats in general are seeking to prevent Essayli from becoming the permanent U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, where the enforcement of immigration law is a major engagement.
In his short time as U.S. Attorney, he has facilitated the Trump Administration’s “Operation Alta California” immigration law enforcement campaign, which was initiated in earnest on June 2. That has included obtaining search and operation warrants for those suspected of being in the country illegally or workplaces and other settings in which large numbers of undocumented aliens or illegal immigrants are or were believed to be congregating, as well as processing the deportation paperwork for thousands of foreign nationals living in Southern California who failed to comply with the requirement that they register as being present on U.S. soil and obtain visas or permission to remain as legal residents. The U.S. Attorney’s Office under Essayli has extended that support of Operation Alta California to include prosecuting those who have interfered with Immigration and Naturalization Service, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or Department of Homeland Security agents or obstructed the operations they were carrying out.
On June 6, David Huerta, the president of the Service Employees International Union California, was arrested during a demonstration against Immigration and Custom Enforcement Agency action at a workplace in downtown Los Angeles when he reportedly smashed a gate, assaulted a law enforcement officer while screaming profanities and using language likely to provoke violence.
Essayli, in his capacity as U.S. Attorney charged Huerta with conspiracy to impede an officer, a felony under federal law.
Though undoubtedly in Democratic-dominated California Essayli’s support of the Trump Administration with regard to immigration enforcement is decidedly unpopular, there are yet huge swathes of the population in California who look upon the enforcement of immigration law in a favorable light. Simultaneously, those people view the courage being exhibited by those, such as Essayli, in making that enforcement effort in a positive light. As one major landowner in San Bernardino County, who had witnessed the chaos and destructive riots that grew out of the anti-immigration enforcement protests last week in Los Angeles County put it, “You can’t take issue with holding goons who enjoy the benefit of city improvements destroying those improvements accountable.”
More pointedly, it does not appear that those trying to block Essayli’s permanent nomination, even if they can get Padilla and Schiff to go along with them, have the overall political muscle needed in the forum – the U.S. Senate – to achieve their goal.