Letters to the Editor | June 15, 2025

As an immigrant, I never doubted my freedom of speech. Ironically, now a naturalized citizen, writing this letter worries me. It is easy to see racial overtones in current immigration enforcement, which tugs at the heart of colored immigrants who know that sickening feeling, to be angry at federal agents doing controversial work. But like federal forces who enforced desegregation, and veterans I worked with who were spat on after returning from Vietnam, many are just doing their job. While some on either side demonstrate anger and irrationality, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi, we should be peaceful but forceful. It is difficult yet essential to demonstrate compassion to undocumented immigrants suffering indignities, those enforcing the law, and most difficult to those who don’t appear to show any in return.

This is a nation of laws, and breaking them has consequences. But what if we feel such laws perpetuate injustice? We can choose to burn them and the Constitution down, or we can choose to build a caring citizenry, spread consensus and awareness to make our laws more just, and to further strengthen and preserve this union. Every single one of us has that choice to make. I know what I choose.

Naveen Balasundaram, Bala Cynwyd

The news that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has decided to fire all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is such an outrage. As a well-known anti-vaxxer, the prospect that he will probably replace these eminent experts with vaccine skeptics should scare all of us. He has already announced defunding all research around mRNA, which was the reason we cut COVID-19 vaccine development to under a year instead of eight to 10 years. With the prospect of going back to the “old” way of creating vaccines, we are setting back vaccine development by a decade and allowing hundreds of thousands to die needlessly for something totally preventable.

Along with firing hundreds of scientists and defunding nearly 2,500 National Institutes of Health grants, he is destroying our already fragile public health infrastructure. He should never have been confirmed, and he is going to accelerate our decline in life expectancy. He needs to go.

Walter Tsou, Philadelphia

The insane Department of Government Efficiency escapade is doing far more damage than closing campgrounds at Pennsylvania’s largest lake and ruining small businesses. Donald Trump and Elon Musk fired thousands of IRS workers, undoubtedly leading to more tax cheating by the rich and massive increases in the national debt, already headed for a $3.1 trillion increase. Across America, national parks are being closed — all of them moneymakers for the U.S. Treasury. Yet, these losses are puny when compared with the results abroad. The shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development, by some counts, has already cost 300,000 lives worldwide, where children born with AIDS are now denied the antiviral drugs keeping them alive, and countless other children are dying, denied the peanut bars that kept them alive. Every penny of every cut was diverted to the pockets of America’s billionaires and corporations. Our Congress stands by, idly watching this all happen. While Musk has vanished, he left a troop of unknown techies behind him in agencies and cabinet departments, where cabinet members have not even met them, nor know what they are doing. What a foolish, greedy, cruel, and uncaring nation we have become.

Stephen E. Phillips, Philadelphia

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