As the nation confronts growing ranks of ICE officers engaging in systemic illegality on the streets of the nation’s cities and towns with the overt approval of the Trump administration, the question arises as to whether states have the ability to hold these rogue cops to account.
In just a few short months, it has become routine for gangs of masked ICE storm troopers to run rampant, engaging in patently illegal acts of brutality as they mass arrest people without due process and detain them in ad hoc concentration camps, some located inside federal office buildings.
Just in the past week, ICE officers have been videotaped brutally beating a gardener who’s the father of three Marines, apparently because he was “aggressively” trimming the hedges outside an IHOP. Other masked thugs tackled and detained a US citizen as she filmed them bragging about grabbing “31 bodies” outside a Home Depot.
The audacious lawlessness of these federal “immigration enforcement” officers has reached the point that they now feel free to assault elected officials who have the temerity to call out their illegal acts. Plainly, these masked thugs are acting with full confidence that, far from holding them to account, their supervisors — and even agency heads — endorse their systemic criminality.
Given that Trump administration officials are giving license to mass criminality among federal law enforcement officers, there may be only one remaining avenue for bringing such criminal cops to justice: State prosecutions.
The “states’ rights” option
The Supreme Court has long recognized that federal officers can be held to account under state criminal laws under certain circumstances, though such charges are rare.
Until recently, most liberals would have been uncomfortable with the idea of states taking action against, let alone prosecuting, federal workers — particularly federal law enforcement officers. This is because, since the Civil War, and especially since the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s, federal law enforcement agencies have been called upon to enforce the rights of people of color and others facing mistreatment by state and local governments.
And, prior to the Trump era, those advancing the principle of “states’ rights” against purported federal overreach have typically been on the right — sometimes the extremist right.
