Tucson Speaks Out: May 28

Melting ICE

Thank you for your two-day installment, "Inside ICE Detention." These affronts to humanity belong on the front page, and the Star could not have picked a more appropriate time than the Memorial Day holiday to shine a light into this darkness. Please continue your series: we need our free press more than ever to defend truth and decency.

Will Clipman

West side

Star’s front page coverage

I commend and admire the courage of the Arizona Daily Star's front page news on May 24-25, and the expertise and excellent reporting by Emily Bregel and Emily Hamer.

President Trump and the Republican Party’s ICE are abusing and violating Americans and Others. It is time to stand up and be counted to resist in any legal way to do so.

Two people have set up a site at gtfoice.org/ One can sign up to help.

They have built a rapid response network to stop ICE detention centers before they start. Receive immediate alerts if a facility is planned for your community and help lead the local fight to stop it.

Pat Bannon

Midtown

Secretary of State should not endorse candidates

The secretary of state and county recorders, like judges, should be required to refrain from endorsing candidates and ballot measures in state and local elections. This is necessary to ensure there is no appearance of impropriety that taints public confidence in our democratic process.

Amelia Cramer

Downtown

MAGA has buyer's remorse

The MAGA crowd was fine with an insurrection, women's rights being stripped, fellow citizens murdered in the streets, and hanging out with a child predator, but $6 gas is just too much to bear. They voted for racism and hatred, and that's just what they got. Did they really think a man who has spent his whole life trying to enrich himself was suddenly going to become a champion of the common man? They saw what he was in the first term, and they voted for him anyway. MAGA's bar is very, very low.

Mary Zimmerman

SaddleBrooke

Kerr local and American hero

A letter to the editor from a writer who doesn’t understand Steve Kerr’s beliefs says Steve shouldn’t speak about world affairs. This writer thinks he knows more than Steve about Israel.

Steve Kerr, a University of Arizona hero and a World, Olympic, and NBA champion, learned from Lute Olson about being a true leader of men.

In The New Yorker, Steve said that Israel “sought revenge for October 7th, and now 72,000 Palestinians have been killed while Israelis were illegally taking over the West Bank.” That statement was 100% true, although the numbers may have since changed.

Steve did not say that Israel was committing genocide, although, in my opinion, they are. Many people will disagree, and many of those people are Jewish.

Steve Kerr has risen to the highest levels of his profession and is respected by both his peers and his fans.

John Bingham

Northwest side

Brave enough to change your vote?

DJT's on and off war in Iran is whiplashing our entire country; the country's economy, our family budgets and in many cases even our mental health. This is a man whose own mental health needed to be questioned years ago.

It is disappointing that 49.8% of Americans in 2024 did not give DJT's mental and physical well-being more consideration when voting. Now we must live with a president's increasing instability, which negatively impacts our lives and, in many cases, the entire world.

This November's election will determine if enough Americans acknowledge this instability and then vote to begin changing this dire and ever-increasingly dangerous situation.

Fran McNeely

Northeast side

Inside ICE detention

Many thanks to Emily Hamer and Emily Bregel for their informative and moving special investigation, "They're Torturing Me." I finished reading the article with a deep sense of the brutalities of ICE detention. The article struck the perfect balance between personal stories and additional relevant information. I believe most of us access national and international headlines via online sources and, by the time they make it into a newspaper, they are often "old news." I urge Daily Star editors to include these in-depth analyses more frequently — wonderful content and an ideal use of space.

Elizabeth Jaeger

Midtown

Fines for illegals

OK ... the article on the front page about new fines for illegals sent this Republican over the edge. Why oh why are we trying to deport and outrageously fine people who have been here for years, many brought here as children, who are hard-working, good people? The idea of "fining" these people from $5000 to $553,000 (as written on the front page) is crazy.

I was a teacher in Costa Mesa, California, for 28 years. Every year, I had students who today would be labeled "DACA", children brought to this country as children and infants. It grieves me greatly to think some or all of these kids, who today would be in their 30s to 50s, might be threatened with fines or even deportation to countries they have never lived in.

I do not feel safer when people like Karla Toledo are arrested and fined or deported. Please stop this insanity now!

Barbara Toohey

Foothills