The House has just passed a watered-down version of the Violence Against Women Act by a vote of 222 to 205. The GOP-backed iteration of the bill strips out the provisions to protect undocumented, Native American, and LGBT victims that were included in the Senate version.

VAWA is usually a non-controversial, bipartisan effort, but this year has become a political talking point, with Republicans trying to slow its passage and providing fewer protections for victims. A misogynistic ‘men’s rights’ group has even voiced its support for the GOP’s version of the bill.

Meanwhile, a female Republican joined other women Senators in pressuring the House GOP to pass the Senate’s version.

The House also voted down, by a vote of 187 to 236, a request to send the bill back to the Judiciary Committee. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI) introduced the motion, saying that the Republican’s bill violates the confidentiality a victim is entitled to by telling her abuser that she called the cops.

Now that the House has approved its version of the bill, it will go to conference to be negotiated by both the House and Senate. The President has issued a veto threat should the House version of the bill come to his desk.

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.

On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the conditions of detention centers for immigrants who are facing deportation. The hearing was meant as a follow-up to new health and safety standards put in place by the Obama Administration, but Republicans were there to argue that detained immigrants — who include victims of human trafficking and asylum-seekers– had it too good at the facilities.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), who chairs the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, titled the hearing “Holidays on ICE,” alleging that the detention centers are like vacations for those brought there by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Smith said in a press release that “the Obama administration’s new detention manual is more like a hospitality guideline for illegal immigrants.”

Other House Republicans and their experts piled on Smith’s suggestion that detainees enjoy hotel-like accomodations:

• Rep. Steve King (R-IA) said that 110 deaths since 2003 was not alarming to him. King said he felt it reflects the general population, though those kept in ICE detention centers otherwise do not (PDF), and there is ample evidence of abuse and human rights violations.
• King followed up, inquiring “Is it true that some of the inmates control the keys to their own cells?” The expert responded that he was not aware of that.
• One witness said that detainees had access to move around within the facility. But images of the facilities paint a different picture.
• As part of the new rules, detainees have a hotline to report abuse, During the hearing, the committee’s Republicans painted this as a bad thing. But previous experts have concluded that many facilities do not “meet the threshold of basic human rights standards.” Those standards include permitting detainees access to medical care and allowing women who are being held to give birth without being shackled.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, however, actually had photographic evidence of some of the conditions in these facilities, and they offered up a very different view of the detention centers. Many of her pictures depicted the results of brutal abuse, and one detainee Lofgren discussed died of cancer after being denied access to a doctor for two months.

Immigration advocates in the House have come out strong against Rep. Smith’s hearing. Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA), who wrote legislation pushing for detention center oversight, said that the hearing showed Republicans were seeking “cheap political points” and were unconcerned about the rights of people in the detention centers.

Watch highlights from the hearing below:

Yarelis Bonilla, a 5-year-old Leukemia patient in New Jersey, has been released from the hospital after successfully receiving a bone marrow transplant from her sister last month. But her life-saving procedure almost did not happen because her 7-year-old sister Giselle lived in El Salvador with the girls’ grandmother. After doctors diagnosed Yarelis with Leukemia in August, U.S. officials twice denied a visa for Gisselle to come to the U.S. to donate her bone marrow for her sister:

Gisselle and every member of Yarelis’ family were tested as possible donors when Yarelis was diagnosed with leukemia. Only Gisselle, who lived thousands of miles away, matched perfectly.

Without a transplant, the extremely acute form of leukemia is treated with three years of chemotherapy, [Dr. Alfred] Gillio said. The chance of survival is about 30 percent.

With a transplant, the chance of survival is 70 to 75 percent, he said.

The challenge was to get Gisselle to the United States. She lived with her maternal grandmother in Ilobasco, about 30 miles northeast of San Salvador. Her parents had left for the United States when she was a baby. Yarelis was born two years later in the United States, making her a U.S. citizen.

Family friends highlighted Yarelis’ plight to a local newspaper and Sen. Robert Menendez’s (D-NJ) office. Menendez intervened and the American Friends Service Committee pressured the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau before ICE granted Gisselle “humanitarian parole” in December to come to the U.S. for the procedure.

“The government’s role is to ultimately protect its citizen. [...] In this instance, that happens to mean having this young girl get her sister here to give her a transplant is something we should be able to do,” Menendez said in November. And after ICE granted Gisselle “humanitarian parole,” Menendez said it was “shocking” that “common sense could not prevail over bureaucracy to help save a young child’s life.”

But Nancy Erika Smith, the friend who told Menendez’s office about the visa denials, said she remains angry at ICE officials for denying Gisselle’s visa in the first place. And she is right — it should not require the intervention of a U.S. senator for the immigration system to work in a humane way.

Eleven men who claimed immigration agents violated their rights in 2007 raids on their New Haven, Connecticut neighborhood have won a $350,000 settlement from the U.S. government, attorneys representing the men announced. The government has also agreed to stop deportation proceedings against the men.

The settlement appears to be the largest the U.S. has ever paid in a lawsuit over residential raids, and it is the first to include compensation as well as immigration relief. The men were among 30 people arrested in a raid the day after New Haven began offering identification cards, so critics including New Haven’s mayor claimed the federal sweep was retaliation for the new policy. U.S. immigration officials denied the retaliation claims, saying planning began the year before.

New Haven Mayor John DeStefano, who put the ID program into place, said the settlement highlights faulty immigration policies in the U.S. “Today’s settlement is bigger than a lawsuit. It is about who we are as a nation,” DeStefano said.

Despite the Obama administration’s new policy of suspending deportation proceedings against undocumented immigrants who pose no threat to national security or public safety, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are set to deport a 59-year-old grandmother of four with family members who are U.S. citizens.

A routine traffic stop last June landed Josefina Rodriguez-Vega in the cross hairs of federal immigration enforcement. She was arrested for driving without a license, but released under house arrest and given until January 5 to “voluntarily” leave the country. When Rodriguez-Vega tried to stay in the country after that date by removing her GPS-monitoring ankle bracelet, officials took her to an immigration detention facility.

Maryland faith and community leaders have rallied around Rodriguez-Vega. Dozens of Hagerstown residents protested her pending deportation outside of ICE offices in Baltimore on Wednesday:

“She’s not a criminal,” said her son, David. “She never did anything wrong to be in the process of deportation. She came here from Mexico because her family is here and there’s only poverty there.”

“The question, ‘Why Josefina?’ is critical because she is a Grandmother, she has no criminal record, she does have U.S. citizens in her family, and she has deep ties to her community,” said Elizabeth Alex with Casa de Maryland.What makes this case unique is that it directly contradicts a new policy by the Department of Homeland Security. The policy puts a priority on deporting criminals, not 59-year-old grandmothers.”

But a spokeswoman for ICE says Rodriguez-Vega became a fugitive with criminal misdemeanor convictions when she removed her GPS-monitoring ankle bracelet.

In short, Rodriguez-Vega was caught in a catch-22: she had no criminal record before being snared by ICE, but the act of resisting deportation made her a criminal eligible to be sent back to Mexico.

Officials have not given a date for Rordriguez-Vega’s deportation, but Elizabeth Alex argues that she is a classic example of someone who does not deserve to be deported after living in the U.S. for six years.

A New York Times report in November showed that the policy of prioritizing the deportation of criminals over nonviolent immigrants with deep family ties in the U.S. has been implemented unevenly. A recent test run of the policy in Denver granted reprieve to just 1,600 immigrants out of 7,900 cases, and they were not given legal immigration status.

There is a history of U.S. citizens who were accidentally deported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, and thousands of American citizens have been illegally detained as the federal government cracks down on undocumented immigrants. Now comes the story of a Texas teenager who is a citizen and was still deported.

Dallas resident Lorene Turner had been searching for her granddaughter Jakadrien Turner since she ran away from home at the age of 14 in fall 2010. She searched for months until Dallas police helped her locate her granddaughter — in the South American country of Colombia, it turns out. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had deported Jakadrien in April 2011, even though the African American teenager spoke no Spanish:

News 8 learned that Jakadrien somehow ended up in Houston, where she was arrested by Houston police for theft. She gave Houston police a fake name. When police in Houston ran that name, it belonged to a 22-year-old illegal immigrant from Columbia, who had warrants for her arrest.

So ICE officials stepped in.

News 8 has learned ICE took the girl’s fingerprints, but somehow didn’t confirm her identity and deported her to Colombia, where the Colombian government gave her a work card and released her.

“She talked about how they had her working in this big house cleaning all day, and how tired she was,” Turner said.

Through her granddaughter’s Facebook messages, Turner says she tracked Jakadrian down.

U.S. Federal authorities got an address. U.S. Embassy officials in Colombia asked police to pick her up.

But that was a month ago, and the Colombian government now has her in a detention facility and won’t release her, despite her family’s request.

It is unclear how the teenager was mistaken for a foreign national, and ICE officials told Dallas TV station News 8 that ICE has seen cases where people provide inaccurate information about who they are. “ICE takes these allegations very seriously,” ICE Director of Public Affairs Brian Hale told News 8. “At the direction of [the Department of Homeland Security], ICE is fully and immediately investigating this matter in order to expeditiously determine the facts of this case.”