Reader’s Letters

Dear Editor,

Need help with ICE? If you belong to a significant voting bloc, Congressman Mike Lawler may take your call. If not, don’t count on him.

The recent surge in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests makes this an urgent issue for our community. Too often, law-abiding people are being detained in the streets, their families torn apart without due process. Congressman Lawler, a close ally of ICE, has intervened in a couple of cases—such as the release of Alan Junior Pierre and Yeonsoo Go—yet his choices raise troubling questions.

Although Yeonsoo Go is not a constituent of Lawler’s, she does belong to the Korean community which has a significant voting bloc in Rockland County and her mother is a minister. Alan Junior Pierre is Haitian, part of another significant voting bloc in Rockland County. Meanwhile, when Milton Guamarriga, a longtime Port Chester resident, father of three, steady worker for over two decades, and volunteer firefighter was taken by ICE, Lawler was silent. The difference seems to come down not to fairness, but to vote counting.

Lawler has proven that he has the power to secure releases. But he does not care to fix a failed and cruel system: ICE’s indiscriminate detentions apparently fueled by racial profiling. According to the CATO Institute ICE is now arresting four times more noncriminals per week on the streets than people with convictions. According to the American Immigration Council fewer than 1% of ICE arrests included a judicial warrant.

America now has increasing numbers of masked officers sweep neighborhoods like Spring Valley in fear-driven raids that ensnare U.S. citizens, including children undergoing cancer treatment.

Let’s be clear: Congressman Lawler’s record does not inspire confidence. He voted yes on the 2023 Secure the Border Act, a bill that has been condemned for eroding due process, expanding DHS power, and deputizing local police in immigration enforcement. It also made it harder for immigrant youth to obtain legal protections. This is part of a broader pattern of undermining immigrant rights in service of political gain.

Lawler has a duty to demand transparency (none), legal oversight (none), and accountability from ICE (none). It is not enough to act when it serves him politically—he must stand for justice and due process for everyone.

Every person, regardless of ethnicity or political importance, deserves to be treated with dignity and fairness under the law. Until that happens, Congress—and representatives like Lawler—will continue to fail the people whom they are supposed to represent.

Sincerely,

Mark A. Lieberman

Yorktown, NY

Dear Editor,

Americans are totally missing the boat concerning a budding system of monarchy in America.

The philosophy of kingship says that the king owns, or at least claims, all of the land, natural resources, and government power in the domain. He does this by right of conquest, as was the case with William the Conqueror, who first started monarchy in England.

Trump conquered America in the 2024 election, you will remember. Since then, he has claimed the right to govern autocratically by virtue of that landslide victory, relying on medieval Europe’s time-honored historical model.

The king graciously parses out powerful places in his administration, the economy, and in countries across the world to aristocrats of the wealthy class who dutifully rule like despots in their own domains. Because of their efforts in supporting him and keeping him in power, they have earned the right to immunity from prosecution. Trump has championed immunity for devotees like Mayor Eric Adams of New York City, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil. He has orchestrated immunity for himself, of course, because “the king can do no wrong.”

He treats the national treasury as his own personal checking account, which he, and not the people or their representatives in Congress, has control over. He impounds funds designated for other programs, disappears entire agencies and programs at will, moves funds where he wants them, and designates the requisite tax and budget policies he needs.

Other kings give him lavish gifts, like the gift of a half-billion-dollar airplane from the King of Qatar. He has become one of them and that is how kings treat one another. He also ignores legal restrictions on enriching himself while he is in office. Such restrictions on “emoluments” are absurd, because he owns everything already anyway.

Regarding energy resources, he repeatedly and forcefully has commanded the nation to “drill, baby, drill,” because even what is under the surface of the land belongs to him.

He uses the agencies of government as his own personal political law enforcement staff. For example, he uses the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the National Guard as goon squads to harass and punish adversaries and maintain proper decorum and devotion in the kingdom. He declares himself to be the “chief law enforcement officer” of the nation because it is he alone who makes the laws. Naturally, after making them he must enforce them.

He has no problem exhibiting hypocrisy, like accusing a former high-level advisor of tinkering with classified documents, when he has been cited much more authoritatively for doing exactly the same.

As king, he is entitled to take a cut of revenues of corporations like Nvidia and AMD who operate under his benevolent protection and who desire to export their goods to places like China. He has only delegated stewardship of the nation’s resources to companies, not gifted them irrevocably as some might suppose. He is the chief stockholder of the critical businesses of the nation and as such may claim an ownership stake, as with Intel. He orders companies to return operations from abroad to the United States. He uses tariffs to reward and punish local industry and international agencies and nations. His is the hand that moves all the economies of the world.

And why are Americans so slow to figure out what is going on? It is because our people have never studied the history of monarchy in England or elsewhere in Europe, or classical history, or the history of Asia. We have never even gotten close to studying our own history of dissent from monarchy in 1776 and our ancestors’ century-and-a-half-long devotion to democratic government before serious backsliding began around World War I.

The government, the land, what is under the land, and all resting on the land belong to Trump. His sovereignty over the country is so supreme, that it essentially comes with the blessing of God Almighty. Accordingly, he lays plans to keep the kingdom in his family forever more under God’s protection by preparing one or more of his own children to inherit it all from him.

Get a grip, people. This is the story your grandchildren will be telling about how a different kingdom than the one in the Judeo-Christian scripture came to America because you did nothing to stop it.

Kimball Shinkoskey

Woods Cross, Utah

Dear Editor,

Here is an embarrassing fact about evil in the world today. Evil resides as much in America and Israel as it does in Russia and China. The United States is entirely complicit with Netanyahu in a deliberate effort to starve and kill children and civilian adults in Gaza.

What is being covered up by media and politicians alike is that the purpose of the starvation campaign is to make life so miserable that Gazans will finally want to leave more than they want to stay in Gaza.

Netanyahu and Trump have made it clear they want to own and develop Gaza for their own purposes. Killing tens of thousands of people is no impediment for them. Only a highly humanitarian, well-educated, and civically active people will be able to stop this disaster. No such citizenry can be found in this country or in Israel today.

Kimball Shinkoskey

Woods Cross, Utah

Dear Editor,

If Trump was really serious about stopping crime in Washington, D.C., then he should have used the National Guard on January 6, 2021 when thousands of criminals were beating on the police and destroying parts of the Capitol in an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Instead, he didn’t do anything for over 3 hours while relishing what was happening in his name. He tried to shift the blame of not calling out the National Guard to Nancy Pelosi when it’s now clearly obvious that it was in his power to do so.

Stanley Cracovia

Nyack, NY