The Alabama State Senate voted 20-7 today on changes to HB 56, the nation’s harshest immigration law. Unlike the replacement bill passed by the House, the Senate bill preserves most of the law, including a provision that requires schools to check the immigration status of their students. That provision led to 7% of the Hispanic students in Alabama public schools to miss school the day after the law went into effect for fear that the parents of undocumented students would be deported. Because the bill has scared so many students away from school, Alabama schools may lose funding that is dependent on attendance.

The provision scaring children away from schools is not the only harsh provision left intact by the new bill leaves. Unchanged provisions include one that bars undocumented aliens from renting property and another that allows law enforcement to check immigration status based on a “reasonable suspicion.” It also preserves a section that proscribes a variety of penalties, including permanent loss of license, for businesses that hire undocumented workers. Plus, the new bill piles on by adding another harsh provision requiring the state Department of Homeland Security “to post a quarterly list of the names of any undocumented alien who appears in court for a violation of state law, regardless of whether they were convicted.”

The one bright side of the bill is that it clarifies which “business transactions” undocumented immigrants are prevented from entering into with the state. The new bill only requires proof of citizenship for getting car tags and driver’s, business, and commercial licenses — a change that clarifies a provision that has been used to deny water to immigrants in their homes.

Because the regular session of the Senate ends at midnight tonight, the House and Senate much reach a compromise today for these changes to go into effect. Opponents of the law protested before and after the vote by the Senate, and protests are expected to continue. Four of seven protestors who blocked a Senate hallway were led away in handcuffs.

–Alex Brown

ThinkProgress has noted the hardly unsurprising fact that HB 56, Alabama’s draconian anti-immigrant law, has caused Hispanic children to be subjected to increased bullying in the state’s public schools, so it’s not a stretch to imagine that drop-out rates within Alabama’s Hispanic community have risen as students no longer feel welcome. It’s easy to see that the harsh enforcement of the HB 56 legislation is inappropriate in an educational setting; in fact, members of the Birmingham Board of Education passed a resolution last year to oppose HB 56 for this very reason.

Last week, a U.S. Justice Department official added to the mounting criticism of HB 56, saying the harsh legislation has already had “lasting” negative effects on the state’s Hispanic students. Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez, head of the federal department’s Civil Rights Division, addressed a strongly-worded letter to Alabama’s education department on HB 56′s consequences for school children:

Hispanic students absence rates tripled while absence rates for other groups of students remained virtually flat. [...] The rate of total withdrawals of Hispanic children substantially increased, with 13.4% of such children having dropped out between the beginning of the current school year and this February.

As Perez goes on to point out, the Constitution guarantees immigrant students’ right to an education — and even on top of that, nearly 99% of all of Alabama’s K-12 public school students are, in fact, U.S. citizens. After conducting interviews with students, parents, and teachers in the state’s public school districts, the DOJ official has determined that many school children of Hispanic origin feel “unwelcome in schools they had attended for years” regardless of their immigration status.

Just as Perez makes clear, the harmful HB 56 legislation has already begun to do its damage. In order to prevent even more negative effects on Alabama’s children — both immigrants and U.S. citizens — it has to go immediately.

The harm from Alabama’s extreme anti-immigrant law has been obvious for months: children denied benefits and scared away from school, families denied water in their homes, crops left to rot without enough workers. The clear damage from HB 56 should have spurred officials in Alabama to work to change the far-reaching immigration enforcement provisions soon after the law went into effect last fall. Lawmakers in the Alabama House and Senate opened the legislative session in February by proposing changes to HB 56, to no avail.

Now, months after they should have acted, Alabama legislators finally introduced a rewrite of HB 56 to address the immigration bill’s severe flaws — only to add another provision that makes the bill even worse:

Long-promised revisions to the state’s controversial immigration law were filed Thursday afternoon, with one significantly expanding provisions allowing officers to detain those they have “reasonable suspicion” of being in the country unlawfully.

Under the current law, police could apply “reasonable suspicion” to the individual arrested or cited during a traffic stop. The new bill would allow law enforcement to detain anyone else in the vehicle.

Police would only be able to ask about a person’s immigration status during traffic citations or arrests instead of at any stop, but this is still an invasive addition to the law to allow police to question anyone in a car, not just the driver. Todd Stacy, spokesman for House Speaker Mike Hubbard (R), said law enforcement officials requested the expanded interpretation of “reasonable suspicion.”

To be fair, the rewrite of HB 56 also revises two of the most troublesome provisions of the original law. The rewrite changes a “business transactions” provision that had been used to prevent people who could not prove their legal status from receiving utilities like water and gas. Under the revised bill, people will only be asked to prove their citizenship when applying for a car tag, business license, or driver’s license. The changes also eliminate a provision that required schools to collect enrolling students’ immigration status, which had scared children into not going to school when the law first went into effect.

But taking out the worst of the enforcement measures in HB 56 — provisions that courts have already suspended — does not change the damage the state has already seen because of HB 56. One study estimates that Alabama could lose more than 100,000 jobs and billions in GDP because of the immigration law.

Despite the problems, Republican officials yesterday emphasized that the tweaks would not change the purpose of HB 56. “The essence of the law will not change: Anyone living and working in Alabama must be here legally,” Gov. Robert Bentley (R) said. And Hubbard scoffed at the idea of removing such a harmful law from the books entirely. “Some activist groups don’t have a problem with illegal immigration and will only be happy if the law is repealed,” he said. “That’s not going to happen.”

HB 56 is hurting the state’s residents as well as its image to the rest of the world. Fully repealing the bill would be the best option — several lawmakers introduced a bill to do just that — and taking out some of the most harmful provisions helps. But adding another layer to HB 56 that puts more people at risk of being profiled is a big step backwards.