According to the Attorney General, eligible families will receive $300 a month for young children and $250 per month for families with children between the ages of 6 and 17. The IRS will provide the credit as a monthly payment.

“The pandemic has been tough on families across California,” said Bonta. “The Child Tax Credit payments should be a bright spot for our families, putting money in their pockets as the country begins our recovery. No parent should go to bed worried that these payments will be seized by some debt collector.”

The new tax credit is part of President Biden’s American Rescue Plan, which is to provide $1.9 trillion in economic aid.

NEWSBREAK | Contributed

Find your latest news here at the Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle

The post Debt collectors and financial institutions warned by California attorney general appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California’s new attorney general on Tuesday promised an increased focus on hate crimes, saying there is “a state of crisis” because of increases in attacks on Asian Americans since the coronavirus entered the U.S. after originating in China.

Rob Bonta announced a new Racial Justice Bureau within his California Department of Justice and said he will hold a virtual meeting with the mayors of the state’s 13 largest cities later this month to discuss hate crime.

About half of hate crimes go unreported, they are difficult to prosecute because the law requires something to show they are driven by racial or other discrimination, and they affect many races, religions and sexual orientations, he said.

But “make no mistake, right now we’re in a full on state of crisis, a full on state of emergency, when it comes to hate violence against the Asian-Pacific Islander community,” he said.

Last week, two Asian American women were stabbed in an unprovoked attack in San Francisco, and a Los Angeles County jail inmate was charged with hate crimes after he knocked down and repeatedly punched a jail employee who is Asian American.

Bonta, a Democrat, is the first Filipino American to hold the state’s top law enforcement post, and used his first news conference since taking office April 23 to highlight the problem. Gov. Gavin Newsom appointed the former Assemblyman to replace Xavier Becerra, who became the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary.

He said the new bureau will initially include six attorneys and a supervising deputy attorney general within the department’s Civil Rights Enforcement Section.

Aside from addressing hate crimes, the bureau will focus on other existing racial and social justice issues before his agency, including white supremacy, racial bias in policing, encouraging diverse college campuses, and the state’s new task force to study reparations for African Americans.

Find your latest news here at the Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle

The post New California attorney general pledges focus on hate crimes appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.