As communities up and down California ban homeless encampments, one Bay Area city is trying to go a step further.

The city of Fremont is set to vote on a new ordinance that would make it illegal to camp on any street or sidewalk, in any park or on any other public property. But, in an apparent California first, it also would make anyone “causing, permitting, aiding, abetting or concealing” an illegal encampment guilty of a misdemeanor — and possibly subject to a $1,000 fine and six months in jail.

That unusual prohibition — the latest in a series of crackdowns by communities following a Supreme Court decision last summer — has alarmed activists who worry it could be used against aid workers who provide services to people living in encampments.

While Fremont Mayor Raj Salwan told CalMatters that police won’t target outreach workers handing out food and clothing, the ordinance doesn’t specify what qualifies as “aiding, abetting or concealing.”

Experts say the city could enforce the same ordinance against ordinary citizens in contact with what the ordinance defines as an illegal homeless encampment.

The broad language has left Vivian Wan, CEO of Abode Services, “very fearful,” she said. As the city’s primary nonprofit homeless services provider, Abode regularly sends outreach workers into encampments to help people sign up for housing and shelter, pass out information about food pantries and other services, hand out coats during cold spells, and more.

“The job’s hard enough,” Wan said. “I can’t imagine doing the hard work that’s both physically and emotionally draining and then also have to be worried about your own legal liability. It’s incredibly frustrating.”

Fremont’s proposed ordinance, which passed an initial city council vote 4-2 and is set for a final vote on Feb. 11, is part of a recent statewide trend toward more punitive anti-homelessness measures.

Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court in Grants Pass v. Johnson ruled cities can ban camping on all public property, even if they have no shelter beds available.

Since then, more than two dozen California cities and counties have passed new measures banning camps or limiting where people can camp, brought back previously unenforced ordinances, or updated existing camping ordinances to make them more punitive.

In December, during the first meeting of Fremont’s newly elected City Council, more than a dozen people spoke out against the proposed camping ban during a lengthy public comment period, saying it would be immoral to criminalize people for having no home.

Just three people spoke in favor of the ordinance, urging council members to take residents’ safety into consideration and respect the rights of taxpayers who expect to be able to use the public spaces they pay for.

Councilmember Raymond Liu expressed a similar opinion before voting in favor of the ordinance.

“I’ve had a lot of people come up to me and tell me that they don’t feel safe using our parks or our libraries because of the amount of encampments nearby,” he said.

In some parts of California, enforcement is going beyond the people who live within an encampment. In September, local journalist Yesica Prado was arrested in Oakland while documenting the city’s removal of a homeless encampment.

The year before, Oakland made it a misdemeanor for someone to fail to leave a designated “ safe work zone,” which can include the area around an encampment cleanup.

Civil rights watchdogs — and even the feds — have pushed back when they’ve felt cities have gone too far.

Los Angeles’ ordinance banning the storage of private property in a public area, often used to cite unhoused people, also makes it a misdemeanor to “willfully resist, delay or obstruct” a city employee from taking down a tent or removing other property.

The religious organization Micah’s Way sued in 2023 after the city of Santa Ana banned it from serving food to unhoused people.