Readers React: Obama’s immigration conundrum: Enforcing past administrations’ policy failures

To the editor: Today’s immigration policies are a carry-over from the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. (“Judge says immigrant families should be released from detention: What happens now?,” July 26)

President Obama was in office when a bipartisan coalition in the Senate passed his immigration reforms in 2013.

But the do-nothing House, controlled by the Republican Party that decided on Day 1 of Obama’s presidency that it would defeat anything the president proposed, thwarted him and the bipartisan Senate coalition that wanted the immigration bill enacted.

So the U.S. district judge’s ruling that hundreds of immigrant women and children should be released is really a blow to the Reagan-Bush-Bush immigration policy, which the Republican majority in Congress will not allow Obama to change. In effect, the ruling is a blow to U.S. immigration policy of the last 30 years.

Jaidev P. Rao , Los Angeles

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To the editor: The front-page part of the story on the immigration ruling stressed the “deplorable” detention conditions faced by women and children being held for entering the U.S. illegally. It is only on Page A15 that the story discloses the legal basis for the ruling.

Wouldn’t the law still apply, and therefore the ruling be the same, even if the conditions were not deplorable? Focusing on the deplorable conditions rather than the violation of the 1997 Flores agreement on housing immigrant children seems to be an attempt by The Times to bias your reporting of the story by emotionalizing it.

Gerry Swider, Sherman Oaks

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