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.

Reports of widespread abuse at schools across Los Angeles have shaken the district, but most of the attention has focused on Miramonte Elementary, a school in South Los Angeles in a working class neighborhood. Police say a teacher abused dozens of students at the school, many of whom are the children of Latino immigrants. Now, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which is investigating the abuse, is concerned that some of these parents will not come forward because they are afraid of deportation.

The department has assured parents they will not ask about their immigration status when they come forward, but parents are not convinced:

“That is what they say, but it’s one thing that they say it and another that they do it,” said the father of a 10-year-old female student at the school, a man named Raymundo who was reluctant to use his last name because he is undocumented. “I don’t trust them. If I had a ferocious pit bull at home, and I told you to come in, it won’t bite, what would you do?”

Raymundo is one of several parents who, rather than go directly to the authorities, have sought legal counsel. He and other parents are among those filing personal injury lawsuits against the school district on behalf of eight students whose families believe they were abused by the teachers, both charged with committing lewd acts against children. [...]

[Attorney Jessica] Dominguez said she knows of at least two families at the school who are refusing to come forward because they don’t want to be found out. Raymundo said he’s spoken to several undocumented parents who believe their children were harmed.

“I think there are more than five or six parents of the children who don’t have documents, or even children who don’t have documents,” he said in a phone conversation.

Raymundo added that he went to the school to talk to the school’s director, but was told the director was busy so he could talk to the sheriff. “But I didn’t want to. I thought they were going to ask me for identification. So I left the school,” Raymundo said.

The problem Miramonte parents are facing highlights how abuse victims are reluctant to come to the police because they fear being deported. These victims can access U-Visas, intended for crime victims, which some Miramonte parents are pursuing. But that won’t alleviate the fears of all parents or convince all victims to come forward.

It’s the same problem that undocumented domestic violence victims face as well. The re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act passed the Senate Judiciary Committee, but with unanimous GOP opposition for the first time since 1994. Republicans oppose it because the act “expands the availability of visas for undocumented immigrants who have been victims of domestic violence.” There is no reason for the GOP to oppose a measure that would better protect abuse victims. And the horrible abuse at Miramonte Elementary that parents are afraid to report because of their immigration status is another reason to offer protection so that undocumented immigrants will feel safe coming forward to police.

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.

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.

Despite the harm caused by a harsh immigration law in the neighboring state of Alabama, Mississippi State Rep. Becky Currie (R) filed a bill, HB 488, that would implement an Alabama-style law in Mississippi. Unlike anti-immigrant laws in states like Georgia and Arizona, Currie’s bill includes Alabama’s unconstitutional provisions driving the children of immigrants out of schools and potentially making it a felony for undocumented immigrants to take a shower.

Significantly, Currie is a member of the organization State Legislators for Legal Immigration (SLLI), an anti-immigrant group of 65 lawmakers whose members “have promoted conspiracy theories about supposed government concentration camps and a coming one-world government, as well as false claims that President Obama is a foreigner and a Muslim.” SLLI also touts its “working partnership” with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an anti-immigrant group designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. FAIR, whose attorneys include Romney immigration advisor Kris Kobach, draft much of the legislation pushed by SLLI members.

Like Alabama’s law, Currie’s bill would require schools to check a newly enrolled student’s citizenship or legal resident status, according to the bill:

“Every public elementary and secondary school in this state…shall determine whether the student enrolling in public school was born outside the jurisdiction of the United States or is the child of an alien not lawfully present in the United States.”

When Alabama schools began enforcing the same policy, students with immigrant parents were terrified. Many stayed home, and more left Alabama schools permanently as their families fled the state. The Justice Department even stepped in to ensure that the law was not stopping students’ right to an education. Students in Mississippi could face the same fear under the proposed law.

HB 488 would also prevent an undocumented immigration from entering “into or attempt to enter into a business transaction with the state or a political subdivision of the state.” This provision is open-ended, “including, but not limited to, applying for or renewing a motor vehicle license plate, applying for or renewing a driver’s license or nondriver identification card, or applying for or renewing a business license.” A similar provision in Alabama was interpreted so broadly that public utility companies refused service to anyone who could not prove they are a legal resident or citizen. Under this interpretation, it became a felony for an undocumented immigrant to simply have water at his home to take a bath.

Alabama should serve as a prime example to Mississippi of the harm that can come from extreme immigration policies designed to do little more than make the lives of undocumented immigrants impossible in that state. But it is unlikely that legislators who agree with Currie will listen.