Readers Write: Kilmar Abrego Garcia, canceling Social Security numbers, RFK Jr., water rules

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes letters from readers online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

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It seems ironic that the Department of Justice and the Trump administration are saying they cannot bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had protected status from deportation and was illegally deported to El Salvador after an “administrative mistake.” Even after the Supreme Court recently ruled the government must facilitate his return back to the U.S., their logic to not immediately bring him back is that El Salvador is a sovereign nation and we cannot tell it what to do.

Well, Greenland is part of a sovereign nation, but that doesn’t stop any of the discussions by the administration of our country taking over Greenland by either economic or military action. If the administration really wanted to correct its illegal deportation of Abrego Garcia, President Donald Trump could just require his release and return.

Jan McCarthy, Eden Prairie

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How impotent our commander in chief is that he doesn’t have the power to bring a wrongfully imprisoned man back to the United States!

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The Supreme Court has ruled that the Trump administration must facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to an El Salvador prison. The administration’s claim that the United States has no authority to do that would be laughable if it was not so pathetic. The administration made a deal with El Salvador to take deportees; it can make a deal to get one back.

Karen S. Lee, Cambridge

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Due process. The words are plain, and the concept is a bedrock of our system of justice. The U.S. Supreme Court recently affirmed 9-0 that the Trump administration must afford due process rights to justify deportations. Whether that is happening we do not yet know. But what we do know is that many people who have visas are having their visas revoked. Other people who have initiated asylum procedures or similar citizenship procedures are apparently being rounded up and detained. My first question about these actions by the administration is, who is making decisions about who should have their visas revoked and who should be detained? And exactly what criteria are being used to make those decisions? Is it just one person in Trump’s administration who decides? Who is that person? What is that person’s background and experience that allows him/her to decide? If it is a panel of people who decides, who is on that panel? What criteria have they established? Or, to bring these questions closer to home, if I become an identified target because of something I have written or said, who will be the administrative person(s) that will identify me as a target? To what extent do those deciders consider and weigh free speech rights?

Thomas Wexler, Edina

The writer is a retired judge.

Our country is living in real time the dystopian plot lines of fiction novels that were core reading in my high school English classes. Minnesota’s own Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here” (1935), and of course George Orwell’s “1984” (1949) and “Animal Farm” (1945), warn of the authoritarian dangers facing any democracy.

Today I read “Social Security death scheme aiming to force out immigrants” about how our country’s current administration is now “canceling the Social Security numbers [legal immigrants and others] had lawfully obtained” by placing these people on Social Security’s “death master file.” 2025 has become the year of the living dead in our country, with officials declaring as “dead” individuals who are very much alive and living legally in the U.S. “The goal is to cut those people off from using critical financial services like bank accounts and credit cards, along with their access to government benefits,” this reprinted New York Times article states.

I’ll let lawyers determine what other felonies and misdemeanors our government is committing here. But false information certainly is being submitted illegally — knowingly and intentionally — to the Social Security “death” database. This act is simply a heinous mirror image of when individuals might intentionally keep a dead relative off the Social Security master death file in order to illegally continue receiving that dead relative’s monthly retirement benefits for personal gain. The courts would never allow you and me to get away with this.

Dirk VanDerwerker, Brainerd

After hearing about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s meeting with Food and Drug Administration personnel last week, does anyone still doubt that his guy is totally unfit to be in charge of anything? The prerequisite mindset for those that tout conspiracy theories first requires a personal knowledge-based insecurity, coupled with a shallow exposure to the subject and topped off with nonexistent firsthand knowledge.

RFK’s obsession with the “deep state” and ties between government and drug companies is myopic at best. Investing in government research begins the process of discovery that, when partnered with the private sector (drug companies), has yielded infinite benefits for the American public. What other less “nefarious” and more transparent system could be applied to accomplish this better within our current democratic, capitalist structure?

I proudly profess to being a part of the “deep state” for 40 years as a research technologist for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Everyday people work in the federal government at all levels, with families, bills and issues with balancing their lives just as anyone else does. There’s little time, energy or intent to concoct nefarious corruption scenarios. The “deep state” just is a derogatory term for people working in the government, doing the best job they can within a very tight rule-based structure. It’s a rules-based collaborative effort by millions of people, determined by Congress, to serve the needs of the American people.

By the way, anyone who believes that the causes of any brain disorder, especially autism, can be unpacked by a September due date needs to have their own head examined.

I’m a former Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and Metropolitan Council employee who has been to more sewage treatment plants than you can imagine (hundreds). The article about President Donald Trump reversing the rule mandating water-saving appliances (“Home water-use rule dropped,” April 11) failed to mention one of the most important reasons for the law.

There are more than 600 wastewater treatment plants in Minnesota. Multiply that times 50 for the entire country. Every drop that goes down your drains winds up at one of them. These public utilities have saved billions of taxpayer dollars every year thanks to the dramatically reduced volume of wastewater that must be treated. Savings are from both everyday operating expenses and from deferring the need to spend millions on expanding the plant to deal with ever-increasing flows.

Trump and his spokespeople are keen to blame this regulation on Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama. In fact, it was passed with bipartisan support in Congress in 1992 and signed into law by George H.W. Bush. In the 30-plus years this rule has been in effect, I have never encountered a shower that performs poorly, as our president is so fond of describing. If you live in the Twin Cities you can thank these low-flow appliances for keeping your sewer bill low (and also thank the well-trained dedicated public employees who work there).