As a Minnesota Senate committee approved voter ID legislation yesterday, more than 200 citizens lined the capitol building’s halls holding signs to oppose the measure.

“ALL Our Voices Count. No Voter ID Amendment” their signs read as they stood outside the Committee on Local Government and Elections hearing room, protesting the possible new requirement that citizens present certain forms of photo identification at the polls or be barred from voting.

Senate Republicans did not permit any citizens to testify on the legislation. It passed the committee along a party-line vote, 8-6, and now advances to the full Senate.

Though the Republican-controlled Minnesota legislature passed a voter ID bill last year, it was vetoed by Gov. Mark Dayton (D). If the both legislative chambers succeed again in passing voter ID this year, it will appear as a constitutional referendum on the November ballot for all Minnesotans to consider.

Workday Minnesota has more on the voter ID bill’s ramifications:

According to the Secretary of State, the proposed constitutional amendment would disenfranchise 215,000 registered voters in Minnesota – mainly elderly, disabled and homeless citizens – who do not have a valid driver’s license or ID card with a current address on it. It would also deny the vote to 500,000 eligible voters who use Election Day registration

Minnesota has a long history of strong voting rights laws and an engaged civic culture. In 1973, it became the first state (along with Maine) to allow citizens to register on Election Day. The Gopher State has had astronomically high voter turnout rates ever since. In the past seven elections, it has lead the nation in voter turnout. The last time a state other than Minnesota led was 1994.

However, that point of pride would likely be a relic of the past if Minnesota Republican legislators successfully get the new voter ID bill enacted.

For nine years, Felipe Montes lived and worked in North Carolina. He married a U.S. citizen, and he and his wife have three sons. But after immigration officials deported Montes, an undocumented immigrant, in late 2010, he will likely never see his children again because officials in North Carolina are planning to terminate his parental rights.

Following his deportation, his pregnant wife Marie had trouble keeping her family afloat without Montes’ help. Two weeks after Montes was sent back to Mexico, the Allegheny County child welfare department put their children in foster care. A judge has already terminated his wife’s parental rights, so his children will be placed into adoption proceedings if Montes’ rights are terminated as well, Colorlines reports:

[N]ext week, on February 21, the county’s Department of Social Services plans to ask a judge to cease all efforts to reunify the family and put the children into adoption proceedings with foster families. Though Felipe Montes was his children’s primary caregiver before he was deported and has not been charged with neglect, the child welfare department nonetheless believes that his children, who have now been in foster care for over a year, are better off in the care of strangers than in Mexico with their father.

For Montes, this feels tantamount to kidnapping.

“I cannot find the words to tell you how important my kids are to me. I would do anything for them,” he told Colorlines.com, speaking on his cell phone in Mexico while on a break from his job at a farm. “In this world there are many injustices. At the very least, I would like them to send my kids to Mexico.”

His wife agrees that if the children cannot be with her, then they should live with their father in Mexico. “If they can’t be with me, I want them to be with him,” Marie said. “Nobody is a better father than he is.”

But Allegheny County officials did not approve Montes’ house in Mexico, where he lives with his uncle, as a home for the children. Court documents show that officials ruled it would be a bad environment because the family hauls in water and the floor is cement, but the home study that the Mexican consulate sent to the child welfare department said the home conditions are good. And because he “has not made an [sic] progress toward trying to obtain a temporary VISA or become legal to come back to the United States to visit or get his children,” they say Montes is not a fit parent.

Donna Shumate, Montes’ attorney in North Carolina, said child welfare officials simply refuse to place American kids in Mexico. “It’s not really subtle at all,” Shumate said. “They’ve pretty much said that they won’t place American kids there. He is a good father and the fact that he may be living in different standards now because he’s in Mexico should not prevent children from reunifying with their father.”

Montes’ tragic story is another illustration of how the deportation of nonviolent immigrants tears apart families and strains public resources when children are separated from their parents and placed in foster care. A new report last year reported that at least 5,100 American children had been stranded in the foster care system after their parents were deported or detained. The Department of Homeland Security had announced that it would suspend deportation proceedings against many undocumented immigrants who pose no threat to national security or public safety, but its policy has been applied unevenly. As a result, thousands of families like Montes and his children continue to be separated, potentially forever.

Yesterday, police arrested an unidentified man at the Kansas Capitol after discovering several homemade bombs in his truck close to the Kansas Capitol. The truck had stickers on its back window saying, “Welcome to America. Now speak English” and “Does my American flag offend you? Call 1-800-LEAVE THE USA.’’

This arrest came on the same day that Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), an anti-immigrant official who drafted Arizona’s and Alabama’s harmful immigration laws, urged Kansas lawmakers to pass stricter immigration policies. Hundreds of peaceful protesters also showed up to the capitol to protest Kobach’s arrival.

Unlike far-reaching immigration laws, like the one proposed in Mississippi, Kansas legislators are considering a wide range of immigration measures. Some are designed to both help immigrants find jobs and others would crack down on undocumented immigrants living and working in Kansas.

The protestors argued that the policies are more likely to produce discrimination, worker shortages, and costly lawsuits. “If Mr. Kobach, who is promoting…laws that are separating our families, that are leaving children without their parents, and they’re hurting everyone in our community, we will not stand for that,” Sulma Arias, executive director of Sunflower Community Action, said to the crowd of 300 people who gathered outside of the Kansas Statehouse. They targeted much of their anger at Kobach, but they took their message to Brownback at the end of the day and asked him to distance himself from Kobach.

Although authorities believe that the protests and the explosives are unrelated, it is unfortunate that the man with the bombs did not follow the pro-immigrant protestors’ lead and express himself peacefully.

At a meeting of Texas Tea Party leaders yesterday, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) appeared to suggest that armed resistance could be necessary to combat some unnamed violations of the Constitution:

Santorum was then asked if the Second Amendment is only for hunting and sports, to which he responded emphatically, “the Second Amendment is there to protect the First Amendment!” His own family possesses firearms, he says, both for hunting and handguns for personal protection. He cautioned that if Obama is reelected, the Supreme Court’s Heller Decision, which holds that individuals have a right to possess a firearm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home, will be in jeopardy.

In reality, of course, the judiciary exists to protect the First Amendment. Santorum’s apparent belief that Second Amendment remedies should fulfill this purpose suggests a vigilante approach that is difficult to square with the rule of law. If each citizen can both decide for themselves what the First Amendment means and then use their personal arsenal to enforce it, the inevitable result is chaos.

Moreover, it is unclear just what kind of “First Amendment” violations Santorum believes justify armed resistance to the United States government. This is not the first time, however, Santorum used violent rhetoric in the context of the First Amendment. Santorum is a leading proponent of the false claim that the Obama Administration’s pro-contraception policy violates the First Amendment’s protection of religion, and he recently suggested that Obama shows sufficient disregard for Santorum’s religious world view that it will lead America “to the guillotine.”.

The largest proposed expansion of private prisons in the nation will not proceed after the Florida Senate voted down the proposal on Tuesday.

Though the GOP enjoys a 16-seat advantage in Florida’s upper chamber, nine Republicans joined twelve Democrats to defeat the massive prison privatization bill 21-19. The Miami Herald has more:

The state will not undertake what would have been the single greatest expansion of prison privatization in U.S. history, affecting 27 prisons and work camps in 18 counties and displacing more than 3,500 correctional officers.

Senators debated privatization for nearly three hours, and opponents’ floor speeches often showed more passion. Rather than talk about numbers, they talked about people, such as the treatment of correctional officers, whose starting salary is $34,000 a year and who have not received an across-the-board pay raise for the past six years.

“What’s wrong with state employees?” said Sen. Dennis Jones, R-Seminole. “We should be taking care of them, rather than kicking them under the bus.”

As ThinkProgress reported last year, private prisons corporations have spent millions lobbying legislatures to put more people in jail. After all, leaving for-profit prison beds unfilled hurts their bottom line.

In Florida, the private prison industry wrote large checks to members of the Florida legislature. One such company, GEO Group, doled out $1.3 million in campaign contributions in the Sunshine State over the past 5 years. Gov. Rick Scott (R), a major recipient of private prison money, also attempted to privatize large swaths of the Florida penitentiary system last year, only to have the move declared unconstitutional by a state judge.

To learn more about the disastrous impact of companies that profit by incarcerating people, read this recent report from the ACLU.