Regarding Eduardo Porter’s Aug. 27 op-ed, “Trump’s deportation idea would be nearly impossible to carry out”:
By Letters to the Editor
Curtis Ramsey-Lucas, Hyattsville
Donald Trump’s proposed immigration plan is not “nearly impossible.” It is actually impossible. That fact will not stop Mr. Trump from trying to deport some 11 million immigrants said to be in the United States illegally. The cost of an enterprise of this size and scope has got to be staggering, even measured by Mr. Trump’s standards. The logistics of using the National Guard, hiring the necessary numbers of judges and border security guards, and possibly deploying U.S. military personnel — along with finishing his border wall — would be the largest and most cumbersome operation ever attempted. It flies in the face of common sense.
All of the above aside, the plan is immoral and inhumane. There is a far better way to deal with the illegal immigration issue: Elect Vice President Kamala Harris!
Henry A. Lowenstein, Newport, R.I.
People who do not believe Donald Trump would be able to deport 15 million people usually rely on two things. First, they point out that he does not have the troops or police force to be able to do it. Second, they believe that the American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations would sue and the courts would side with efforts to stop such a program.
I think these optimists, and every other voter, need to be aware of four words: “Posse Comitatus” and “Insurrection Act.” The reason Mr. Trump would not have the necessary police force is because of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act. That law prohibits military personnel, such as the Army, from taking part in civilian law enforcement activities and means that if the president federalized National Guard units, those troops would be considered active-duty military who could not participate in immigration enforcement.
Invocation of the Insurrection Act would resolve both the troops problem and the problem of the courts ruling against Mr. Trump. It effectively is a declaration of martial law and would make Mr. Trump’s desired deportations a matter of national security. The courts would give the president wide latitude and would not overrule his deportation orders once he invoked the Insurrection Act.
Robert Diamond, Burke, Va.
What mass deportation looks like
Regarding León Krauze’s Aug. 14 op-ed, “What deporting 15 million people would look like”:
I was 7 years old, but I remember very well when, in June 1941, Joseph Stalin launched his first wave of mass deportations from Soviet-occupied Lithuania. We watched through a gap between window curtains as Red Army soldiers with mounted bayonets and accompanied by several local Communist functionaries piled a teacher and her two little daughters into an open-bed truck and took them to the railroad station to load them into cattle cars with barbed wire on the little windows for a long journey to Siberia. Her husband, also a teacher, was at a hospital at the time. He was left behind.
My parents also were teachers, and only the start of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union later that month saved our family from the second wave of deportations.
It’s truly unbelievable that a presidential candidate whose grandparents immigrated to the United States is campaigning on the idea that he will deport at least 15 million people. That a candidate whose wife and first ex-wife were immigrants is threatening such horror and there are many who cheer him.
I came to America as a 15-year-old with my family under the Displaced Persons Act signed by President Harry S. Truman. I will always remember the sight of mothers handing their infants from the boxcars at the railroad yard to strangers, asking for help to find some relative to keep the babies because they feared their children would not survive the interminable journey into the unknown.
I hope no one will have to watch such inhuman terror in 21st-century America.
Arvydas Barzdukas, Falls Church
I believe León Krauze’s recent op-ed understated the effect that Donald Trump’s planned deportation of unauthorized residents would have on all Americans. If Mr. Trump is elected and is able to begin mass deportations, Americans should prepare for consequences including:
1. Higher costs for their landscaping and construction projects
2. More expensive fruits and vegetables (if produce is even available)
3. Difficulty finding child-care, elder-care and hospital workers
4. Watching parents being separated from their U.S.-born citizen children, who would be left behind without care, and seeing Latino neighbors racially profiled, asked to prove they are citizens and being erroneously detained or deported, or both
5. A loss of revenue for programs such as Social Security because wage earners who pay into those programs will have been deported
6. The interruption of disturbing and unpredictable raids on schools, churches, hospitals, courts, grocery stores and workplaces in all of our communities.
If you’ve never witnessed the forced separation of young children from the adults who love and care for them, you cannot imagine the trauma of it all.
Be careful who you are voting for — and what you can expect as a result.
Alyson Ball, Charlottesville
In addition to the trauma that would be created by attempting to deport 15 million undocumented people, León Krauze might also have discussed the corruption of U.S. law enforcement that such a plan might cause.
From time to time, we see manifestations of improper force by immigration agencies. Examples include Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents’ confrontation of a Boston resident who was jogging and a Border Patrol agent who questioned two U.S. citizens because he heard them speaking Spanish in Montana.
To carry out deportation of 15 million people, law enforcement would be asked to conduct millions of stops, dwarfing any dragnet that had ever occurred inside the United States. What might individual officers end up doing in service of this goal?
The idea of ejecting a group of people as large as the entire population of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago is a terrible idea that all Americans, not just Hispanics, should reject.
Stuart Gallant, Belmont, Mass.
On Wednesday, support your paper carrier
Since the founding of our country, citizens have wanted to be informed about local, national and world events. The Boston News-Letter, founded in 1704, reported news from Britain, shipping schedules and judicial appointments, and other papers in other cities followed. In the centuries before the telegraph, reliable radio and television, news in other states and other countries could be slow to arrive. But before the arrival of these technologies, we did have another essential institution: newspaper carriers. They provided a critical means for us to access the information we needed to make daily and long-range decisions and to carry on with our lives.
Fortunately for us, even as print newspaper circulation has declined, we still have our newspaper carriers. And they work just as hard as their predecessors did but with added responsibilities. They bag our papers — and in wet weather they double-bag them. Our Washington Post carriers even deliver several other news products.
When I was young, we used canvas bags slung over our shoulders and sometimes wagons, but today, newspaper carriers have the added expense of using their cars. When another carrier cannot make their deliveries, our carrier does their route — giving her a total of about 700 papers to deliver.
Several years ago, when a big storm hit the D.C. metro area, roads were closed in our section of the city because of fallen trees. So at the end of our carrier’s route, she came back, got out of her car and walked a large number of blocks delivering the rest of the papers on foot. Only when she completed her route did she drive back to her home in Frederick.
This Wednesday, we all have the opportunity to recognize these often-unsung professionals on National Newspaper Carriers Day.
I hope we can thank them by putting out balloons, placing a sign in the yard, hanging a banner across the street or mailing them a check to show our appreciation. Early risers, consider offering your carrier a cup of coffee or juice! It’s the least we can do to demonstrate our gratitude for the role our newspaper carriers play in keeping us informed and keeping our democracy alive.
Richard Bienvenue, Washington
