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BOYLE HEIGHTS, LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- One of the dirtiest places in Southern California communities is alongside freeways, where all kinds of trash accumulates.

That's the case in Boyle Heights, where numerous freeways meet. So for this Earth Day, the community took action.

LOS ANGELES - Local state Assembly Member Miguel Santiago and Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón joined several immigrant organizations in Los Angeles Monday to announce proposed legislation that would protect undocumented immigrants from repercussions for reporting certain crimes.

It was late Friday morning when muddy, brown water started rushing onto Michelle Hackett’s Salinas Valley farms.

On one side of her family’s Riverview Farms cannabis business, a county-mandated retention pond overflowed. Next door, a farm abandoned by another grower — one of dozens of cannabis businesses to shut down in Monterey County in recent years — spawned another small river headed straight for Hackett and her skeleton crew.

Anneisha Williams figures she has paid several hundred dollars in overdraft fees over the years, so when her last bank recently refused to refund about $500 a hacker stole from her checking account, Williams decided she was done with banks. 

Williams, 38, works full-time at a Jack-in-the-box in the Los Angeles area and is an in-home care provider. She also is raising six children; she doesn’t have time to hassle with a bank she no longer trusts, she said. 

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — There’s a renewed push in the Capitol to send California families a child tax credit.

California provides families with a child tax credit if they have kids under the age of six, but Assemblymember Miguel Santiago said poverty doesn’t end once your child reaches the age of six.

In 2016, when California voters faced the choice of whether to legalize marijuana for recreational use, they heard promises that it would help end a racist “war on drugs,” bring a violent illegal market out of the shadows and, by the way, bring in tax revenue. Gavin Newsom, then lieutenant governor and now governor, said so. 

More than six years later, while Proposition 64 has cut arrests for marijuana-related offenses, it hasn’t lived up to its billing for the small cannabis growers in Northern California’s famed Emerald Triangle. 

Torrential rains and floods submerged whole towns and killed more than 20 people in parts of California in January. They also caused thousands of farmworkers to lose weeks of pay because the flooded fields and orchards were surrounded by treacherous, watery and muddy roads. 

The steep storm-related losses — along with recent revelations that some farmworkers are living in substandard conditions — are bolstering advocates’ argument that California should expand its safety net to help its agricultural workforce survive such setbacks.

Some lawmakers are listening to them.

In an effort to improve security after 9/11, Congress passed the Real ID Act in 2005 to set federal standards for identification cards.

But in early December, the Department of Homeland Security delayed the ID requirements another two years. 

LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- Starting this month, Los Angeles Superior Court will no longer provide official, free court reporters for some civil cases.

The change means those cases will no longer have an official written record, unless the participants are willing to pay fees to hire their own reporter ranging from $800 to $2,000 a day.

LOS ANGELES - Back in March 2020, I had an appointment with the Department of Motor Vehicles to get a Real ID. Then, the pandemic happened and a lot of us including myself, never got it done.

Today I visited the Van Nuys DMV, where I was welcomed by a security guard at the door who said, "Appointment or no appointment today?"