No. of Recommendations: 8
Arresting federal agents for violating state law is not lawlessness.
True. And arrests in the killings of Good and Pretti might be appropriate.
But having state police arresting ICE agents for "kidnapping" or similar charges, just to send a message or demonstrate resistance, would be lawlessness. Much of what ICE is doing is awful, but lawful. The areas where they are violating laws are civil violations of the rights of the people they're mistreating, and almost always come after the arrest/detention.
Having the police/national guard intervene to try to stop ICE from conducting their detention activities would be unlawful. The states do not have the legitimate power to do that. They (and the people being detained) have every right to seek after-the-fact relief from ICE detention that doesn't comply with the formalities of the law, just like people who are arrested in the criminal system have the right to challenge the sufficiency of warrants or probable cause. But an LEO who arrests/detains someone and is later found to not have had the legal right to do that is almost never actually committing a crime, and state law enforcement knows that.
