Following Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, tonight Kraft became the third major corporation to announce its departure from the right-wing business front group ALEC.

Yesterday, Kraft told NPR that “it was keeping its membership in ALEC.” But by this evening, Kraft reversed its position, announcing it would no longer support ALEC. The company has issued the following statement:

We belong to many external groups, including ALEC, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that promotes growth and fiscal responsibility.

ALEC covers numerous issues but our involvement has been strictly limited to discussions about economic growth and development, transportation and tax policy. We did not participate in meetings or conversations related to other issues.

Our membership in ALEC expires this spring and for a number of reasons, including limited resources, we have made the decision not to renew.

The progressive advocacy group Color of Change has targeted ALEC’s corporate sponsors because they are helping to support voter suppression laws and pushing dangerous “Stand Your Ground” laws.

“We welcome Kraft’s decision to stop supporting ALEC, an organization which has worked to disenfranchise African-Americans, Latinos, students, the elderly, the disabled, and the poor,” ColorOfChange executive director Rashad Robinson said. “We reached out to Kraft months ago and have been in dialogue with them since then to convey the concerns of more than 85,000 ColorOfChange members who called on major corporations to stop supporting ALEC.”

Reuters reports that many other companies, such as drug-maker Pfizer and cigarette-makers Reynolds and Altria are sticking by ALEC.

Earlier this week, Republican Fifth Circuit Judge Jerry Smith ordered the Justice Department to submit a three page, single-spaced letter responding to President Obama’s recent criticism of judicial overreach. Smith’s order is widely perceived as a partisan effort to embarrass the president — even Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren thought the order was so inappropriate that she said that “I’m not so sure the Department of Justice has to comply with this.”

Republican radio host Rush Limbaugh, however, was delighted to see this Republican judge reaching out to aide the Republican Party. As Limbaugh said on his show yesterday:

Now, yesterday afternoon a federal judge by the name of Jerry Smith at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Houston had had enough, and he demanded that the Justice Department give him a three-page memo on whether or not this administration understands the concept of judicial review. Now, I saw this and I started cheering. I started laughing. Because it’s about time people started fighting back on this. The American people love the concept of a team. You have to have the right people on the team, but we are a team here. There is a team that’s opposing this president, and attempting to make him a one-termer this November at the ballot box. It’s great to have this response.

It is, of course, not at all surprising to see a leading Republican so gleeful at this Republican judge’s Republican Republicanism. The only loser in this incident is any perception whatsoever that the Fifth Circuit can be relied upon to see aside its partisan preferences and fairly apply the law. As Orin Kerr, a former constitutional advisor to Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), explains, “the court’s order was highly inappropriate, and Rush’s comments are an excellent example of why. Whatever the judges were thinking, their order was inevitably going to be interpreted as the product of three conservative judges trying to enter the political fray and take on a Democratic President.”

A few months ago, ThinkProgress shared the story of Felipe Montes, a father who was deported from the country and forced to separate from his son, a U.S. citizen. Montes’s wife, also a citizen, struggled without her husband’s income, and eventually her children were taken into the custody of the state.

On Friday, a North Carolina judge will likely terminate his parental rights, and Felipe will never see his son again. The Montes’s case is not rare; other families have reported similar plights, and new data confirms that such stories are common.

In just six months, between January 1 and June 30 of 2011, over 46,000 parents of U.S. citizens have been deported from the United States, according to a report (PDF) issued, without any analysis or commentary, by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Many of the children left behind are stranded in foster care. Indeed, the Applied Research Council (ARC) estimates “that there are at least 5,100 children currently living in foster care whose parents have been either detained or deported.” They continue:

This is approximately 1.25 percent of the total children in foster care. If the same rate holds true for new cases, in the next five years, at least 15,000 more children will face these threats to reunification with their detained and deported mothers and fathers. These children face formidable barriers to reunification with their families.

But this rate of deportation is indeed new. Between 1998 and 2007, over the course of 9 years (PDF), a total of 100,000 parents of U.S. citizens were deported. At the current rate, the Obama Administration will reach that number in just over one year.

There have been a record number of deportations under President Obama. New directives from the President have instructed ICE to provide some administrative relief, using their prosecutorial discretion to focus on only undocumented criminals, but such numbers will not be reflected until ICE’s next report.

Earlier this week, President Obama tried to remind conservatives that, not so long ago, they believed that “the biggest problem is judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint. That an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.” Unfortunately, at least one Republican judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit did not take kindly to this reminder, and he responded by throwing a tantrum during a judicial hearing and ordering a junior Justice Department attorney to write a three page letter intended to embarrass the president.

That letter is due today. Whatever it says, however, the Republican Judge Jerry Smith clearly needs a reminder that there was absolutely nothing unusual about President Obama’s comments. Need proof? Here’s President George W. Bush saying exactly the same things Obama did, over and over again:

Nevertheless, Bush’s former adviser Karl Rove hypocritically called Obama a “political thug” this week for his remarks about the Supreme Court.

PepsiCo, the world’s second largest beverage company, has ended its partnership with ALEC, the controversial right-wing group that lobbies for voter suppression efforts. Pepsi’s move, which actually came in January but was first reported this morning by NPR, may also have had a role in compelling Coca-Cola to drop its support for ALEC.

Yesterday, progressive advocacy group Color of Change announced a boycott effort targeting several other corporations that are still members of the group, which for years has partnered with elected officials at a state level to draft and pass controversial, far-right legislation. Just a few hours later, Coke announced that they too are severing ties with the ALEC. As NPR reported today:

It’s part of a much broader campaign to spotlight companies that sell products to a public that might object to hard-line conservative policies such as stand your ground laws or requirements that voters show a photo ID at the polls.

Some civil rights groups say voter ID laws are discriminatory and suppress minority voter turnout.

“The clear and simple message was that you can’t come for black folks’ money by day and try to take away our vote by night,” said Rashad Robinson, director of ColorOfChange.

ALEC has also been cited as the driving force behind “Stand Your Ground” laws which have contributed to cases like Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Trayvon in February, remains free thanks to Florida’s version of the bill, which ALEC now uses as a template when introducing similar bills across the country.

Yesterday, the Center for American Progress released an extensive new report explaining ALEC’s efforts to disenfranchise voters.