Letters to the Editor | July 16, 2025

Now that the Big Beautiful Bill has passed, and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget has been increased by billions of dollars, there should be enough money to buy name tags and ID badges for all those government agents who are jumping out of unmarked vans and rounding up people who are suspected of being in the country illegally.

Steve Kunz, Phoenixville, [email protected]

While teaching high school history in Philadelphia classrooms, I opined that the Fugitive Slave Act was the worst law ever enacted in this country. It stated that any person suspected of having African blood could immediately be enslaved. Today, we’re seeing similar atrocities repeated under the guise of the Immigration and Nationality Act. People suspected of immigration violations are grabbed off the streets, their workplaces, their homes, and forced into custody due to the color of their skin. Trump’s regime has so undermined the decency of America to ignore due process and take us back to the terrifying days of slavery that people are justifiably fighting back.

Under the Fugitive Slave Act, if a white person stepped in to help an alleged runaway, they, too, would be taken into custody. That’s happening today, as well. People have been locked up trying to stop U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement abductions. People today help detained immigrants with GoFundMe accounts and hide them, just as those on the Underground Railroad did while assisting fugitives to freedom. We all must fight against this unconscionable, immoral overreach by Donald Trump’s ICE, and do everything we can to facilitate humane treatment of people just wanting a better life.

Susan Baraldi, Lansdowne

Imagine it is 2011, you live in Pennsylvania in a neighborhood that is below the poverty level, and you go to an elementary school that is 90 years old. Gov. Tim Corbett cuts public school funding by $1 billion, and your school loses its newest teachers, counselors, aides, secretaries, and custodian. Your class sizes increase; extracurricular activities cease, along with tutoring programs. Your community cannot afford to raise taxes like its wealthier suburban neighbors, so your school does without.

Fast-forward to 2023, when the Commonwealth Court determined the state’s system of education funding unconstitutional. You have spent all 12 years of your education in an underfunded school. You have never had the benefit of an adequate education, yet you and your school are judged to be failing. Since close to 90% of the state’s children attend public schools, the answer is not vouchers and scholarships to solve this problem. The answer is adequately and equitably funded public schools. While Gov. Josh Shapiro’s budget added $1 billion last year, this year it will only add half that amount. At that rate, a kindergartner will be in high school before funding is adequate. Our legislators need to fully fund our public schools within four years so that another generation of children doesn’t slip through the cracks and then be blamed for doing so.

Beth Logue, cochair, POWER Interfaith Statewide Education Justice Team, Philadelphia

A recent obituary for a person who was interested in traffic safety missed the mark. When things that are advocated for are shown to have the opposite effect, it can hardly be a good thing. Things like automated traffic enforcement have been shown many times over to potentially cause problems of various types, so why promote them? Why promote inadequate traffic engineering? A little research can easily show that Philadelphia is being pushed in the wrong direction by people who hate cars, can make money from poor policies, or are misinformed. Some may mean well, but they did not put the time into doing the research. For actual safety, the city should end all forms of automated traffic enforcement, post 85th percentile speed limits, make yellow traffic lights longer, and use fewer stop signs. These solutions are free or low-cost, and I have many more ideas.

James Sikorski Jr., Wapwallopen

I am sad. I am angry. I am embarrassed by what we have endured over the past few months. Our national trajectory is alarming. We are moving toward civil conflict, though its exact form remains unclear. In June, the president celebrated his birthday with a military parade. This was not a patriotic tradition — it was an authoritarian spectacle. At the same time, protests were held across the country. The administration appears ready to use unrest as a pretext for martial law. They claim to defend the Constitution while actively undermining it. This is not routine political disagreement. It is the calculated erosion of democratic norms. Two Americas now exist: one trapped in a web of disinformation from networks like Fox News and the One America News Network, the other struggling to preserve truth and civic order. Social media platforms and corporate media, owned by billionaires, worsen the divide. We are watching a convicted criminal and his inner circle replace public servants with loyalists. What we face is not politics — it is the rise of fascist oligarchy. This may be the turning point. Do not look away. Speak out. Stand up. While we still can.

William Sidler, Lansdale

In April 1968, I was on a picket line in Chapel Hill, N.C. The employer was the University of North Carolina. Workers were the lowest-paid essential university employees. Boom! Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis took on a larger meaning and eclipsed events around the country. This paper, mass media, and social media disconnect past and present. A context and background for comparisons between the strike in Philadelphia and prior job actions is invisible. It is time to remember. Making good trouble is long overdue.

David R. Applebaum, Glassboro

It has become clear that Benjamin Netanyahu and his extreme right-wing coalition in Israel consider the lives of the Palestinian men, women, and children of Gaza to be of no value. Showing total disregard for these civilians, the Israeli government has used its armed forces to relentlessly bomb Palestinian homes, schools, hospitals, and places of refuge, killing more than 50,000 people in the process, the majority of whom are women and children.

The Israeli government has so restricted the supplies of food getting into Gaza that many in that region now face the danger of starvation. When people do go to the few sites where food is being distributed, they face the danger of being shot by the Israeli military. More than 700 people have been killed trying to get food at these sites. So many hospitals in Gaza have been bombed into oblivion, and so many doctors and nurses have been killed that, as a result, there is virtually no working hospital left in Gaza to treat the injured. It could be argued that the way in which Israel has executed its war in Gaza, and the way in which it has shown a total disregard for the lives of the Palestinian people, amounts to a form of genocide.

William Cooney Jr., Philadelphia

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