Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton said Monday that California under his leadership would not obstruct federal immigration enforcement — breaking from the posture of current leadership — while pitching a sweeping affordability agenda centered on tax cuts, lower energy costs and housing reform.
Hilton, 56, is seeking the Republican nomination in a race that will test whether the party can mount a credible challenge in a state that has not elected a GOP governor since Arnold Schwarzenegger left office in 2011.
The entrepreneur and former Fox News host, who immigrated from England and whose parents were working-class Hungarian refugees, framed his candidacy as a defense of legal immigration and a rebuke of what he called 16 years of single-party failure.
“It’s been an experiment in progressive governance, which the party that’s been in charge uses to say it’s a model for the rest of the nation,” he told reporters at a May 19 American Community Media Briefing. “Let’s just be real about the actual state of things in California right now.”
Affordability overhauls
“Today, California has the highest poverty rate of any state. We’re tied with Louisiana for the top. We have the highest unemployment rate of all 50 states, the highest cost of living by far,” he continued, with “gas prices the highest in the country, electric bills the highest-ever except for Hawaii, highest housing costs, lowest home ownership … I’m arguing for a positive, practical change plan to make our state affordable.”
In its 2025 analysis, the U.S. News & World Report ranked California 50th out of 50 states for opportunity. In 2024, the most recent year of Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates, the state’s living costs were 11% higher than the U.S. average.
Hilton’s most immediate proposal: eliminate state income tax on the first $100,000 of earnings.
“That’s the most quick and direct way we can lower costs, through what the government charges, the government taking money directly from people,” he said.
California has the highest combined income tax in the U.S., with a top rate of 14.6% on wages.
Hilton’s campaign estimates the move would cost roughly $8 billion annually, a figure he described as easily absorbed given what he put at an $80 billion “annual cost of waste and fraud and abuse in our budget.”
The figure was taken from estimates from the campaign CAL DOGE, whose investigations found that roughly $425 billion was lost to “corruption, fraud, waste and abuse” in major state programs such as Medi-Cal and CalFresh across five years.
Hilton also proposed scrapping the $800 annual franchise tax that every small business currently pays for existing, matching the federal no-tax-on-tips policy at the state level — which he noted most other states have already done — and capping vehicle registration at a flat $71 per year.
He added that “reversing the damaging energy policies we have” could bring gas prices to $3 “cut your electric bills in half, reduce the cost of housing,” but acknowledged “those things will take a bit longer. The most direct way is to reduce taxes … (our) budget has nearly doubled in the last 10 years, and yet everything is worse.”
On education, Hilton tied poor academic outcomes in basic areas like reading and math directly to “inappropriate spending,” arguing that the school system’s emphasis “on these politicized things and not enough emphasis on the basics of teaching kids to read and write and do math” was especially leaving low-income students and those of color without basic credentials for upward mobility.
“You’re never going to have the chance of the California dream if you can’t read, if you can’t do math,” he said.
Legal immigration
On immigration — the briefing’s most contested terrain, given the audience — he was blunt about where he would draw the line between Sacramento and Washington.
Hilton, who arrived in California in 2012 and is now a citizen, described himself as “the candidate of the legal immigrant community for the legal immigrant community.”
He was direct that he would not do what California’s current leadership has done in resisting federal enforcement.
“The difference you will see with me as governor is that instead of the confrontational approach, which has led to some of these scenes that I don’t think any of us want to see — as we saw in Los Angeles last summer, or even worse, in Minneapolis earlier this year,” Hilton explained. “We will have an approach which is that all the laws must be peacefully enforced, and we will not obstruct the implementation of federal immigration law.”
“Immigration policy is not a responsibility of the governor, it is a responsibility of the federal government, and I very much agree with all the arguments that have been made over the past few years by Democrats about the importance of honoring election results and not undermining democracy, and so the results of the last presidential election were very, very clear,” he said.
“One candidate, one party won all the swing states — a popular vote on a very clear platform on immigration policy, and the administration is now implementing the verdict of the people, and the question for the next governor of California is: Are you going to actively work against the results of the 2024 election when it comes to immigration policy or not?” he continued. “I don’t think that’s even an option, realistically, if you want to be true to your principles of upholding the Constitution and the rule of law, to actually obstruct the implementation of federal law.”
When a reporter pressed him on the consequences for California farmworkers — where approximately half of the workforce self-identifies as undocumented — Hilton pushed back on the premise that no domestic labor alternative exists.
He pointed to California’s historically declining labor force participation rate — from over 67% in 2000 to approximately 62.3% as of March 2026 — and what he estimated as four to five million able, working-age Californians currently not in the workforce and “being paid not to work by taxpayers through the welfare system.”
“I don’t think it’s a reasonable thing to have a system where we say we can’t find Americans to do these jobs, so we have to import labor from other countries illegally, while we have millions of Californians who are not working,” he said.
He also pointed to accelerating agricultural automation — citing his experience at this year’s World Ag Expo in Tulare — as a force that would reshape farm labor needs away from the “lower-paid end,” and argued that California’s “union practices” were slowing adoption of automation technologies more underway in states like Oregon.
On healthcare, Hilton said he would end state-funded coverage for undocumented immigrants, arguing the policy is both fiscally unsustainable and legally questionable.
Aside from already “distressed hospitals,” he said “I think it’s not reasonable to ask California taxpayers to pay money from their taxes to subsidize health care for citizens of other countries,” citing statements by national Democratic party leaders like Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer “who have made it clear that when it comes to federal law, it’s against the law for citizens of other countries to be receiving health care benefits other than that prescribed by Congress, and that’s the position I support for California.”
“What I want to achieve is to restore that ladder of opportunity for every legal immigrant family,” he added. “I’ve lived the California dream, and the simple reason I’m running is that that dream is just not there for most people.”
Election Day is June 2, 2026.
Yes, we voted for Steve Hilton. He can save CA!