[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]

Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, whose Day One memo had ordered prosecutors to give armed robbers a pass, has announced that he’s looking into prosecuting ICE agents.

While Bragg had let a man accusing of raping a teenage girl go with 30 days and probation so that he went on a “sex-crime spree” attacking four different women until one of his victims hit him on the head with a hammer, he aggressively pursued President Trump and subway hero Daniel Penny who had prevented a crazed homeless man from attacking fellow passengers.

As New York City reels from a rape crisis, Bragg is now thinking of prosecuting ICE personnel who are deporting some of the illegal alien sex offenders who are assaulting women and girls.

Bragg and the New York politicians who have been urging the NYPD to arrest ICE personnel are not alone. California Democrats, as usual, are leading the way, passing laws, urging police to arrest ICE personnel and threatening prosecutions over immigration enforcement.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Democrat bills into law that claim to bar federal law enforcement personnel from entering some areas, wearing masks and ordering them to display their names.

Senate Bill 627 warns that law enforcement personnel wearing masks (but not COVID masks) can be charged with “an infraction or a misdemeanor” and also deploys another form of intimidation in the form of a legally futile policy of civil damages for arrests of illegal aliens.

“While the President may enjoy absolute immunity courtesy of his rogue Supreme Court, those who operate under his orders do not. Our state and local authorities may arrest federal agents if they break California law — and if they are convicted, the President cannot pardon them,” Rep. Nancy Pelosi warned.

San Francisco DA Brooke Jenkins proposed identifying ICE agents from videos (demonstrating exactly why masks and the lack of visible badges are needed) and then issuing arrest warrants for them while emphasizing that, at least for now, she’s not proposing direct confrontations between local and federal law enforcement. Not all California officials however are that reticent.

“He is urging law enforcement to investigate and intervene in any unauthorized operations that place public safety or civil liberties at risk,” a statement from Huntington Park Mayor Arturo Flores declared.

The move by the California state government to create the legal infrastructure for trying to arrest federal law enforcement personnel marks a major escalation that could easily tip into violence.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has recognized the dangerous futility of local prosecutions now, threatening ICE personnel, “that maybe they’re not gonna get prosecuted today, although we’re looking at doing that, but they may get prosecuted after the Trump administration.”

A confrontation between sanctuary city policies and the Trump administration was also averted earlier this year in Massachusetts when Boston Municipal Court Judge Mark Summerville tried holding an ICE agent in contempt for ‘obstructing justice’ by detaining an illegal alien criminal but Suffolk DA Kevin Hayden, who had blasted ICE, refused to bring charges, writing that such a move was barred by the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution.

State Democrats are actively seeking legal precedents for prosecuting ICE personnel, but previous legal confrontations between local and federal law enforcement center on the pre-civil war Broderick–Terry duel between two California Democrats, a senator and former chief justice, over slavery, and a later feud in which the former California chief justice was shot and killed by a federal marshall protecting his target, do not favor state indictments of federal personnel.

In a subsequent 1970s case involving a California hippie drug dealer with the comic book name of Dick Dickenson who was shot in the back by a federal agent, a court found that unless a law enforcement officer is acting “out of malice or with some criminal intent”, rather than in the legitimate performance of his duties, he is beyond the reach of local authorities for doing his job.

But the debate in Democrat legal circles over these precedents, over the definition of “reasonable” or “malice”, goes right back to the civil war era that originated the precedent.

The underlying issue here is not the action of any individual ICE agent, but the total opposition of Democrats to ICE as an agency because they’re fighting the enforcement of immigration law. They oppose immigration enforcement because their political power is tied up in various ways with maintaining a large illegal alien population in their jurisdictions any way that they can.

Sanctuary cities and states have taken every possible action to block the enforcement of immigration law, including prohibiting local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement, and are now escalating from passive obstruction to active obstruction.

They have incited and supported mobs and groups engaging in violence against federal law enforcement. Including groups that have sought to individually target ICE agents. After ICE personnel responded to these threats by making up and removing identifying badges, sanctuary state and city Dems have taken to passing laws banning ICE agents from self-defense.

Trying to dress up state obstruction of federal law enforcement as if it were a matter of the conduct or misconduct of an individual federal law enforcement officer is an insurrectionist farce. The laws banning masks are as absurd as if the Confederacy had passed laws banning Union soldiers from wearing blue. Creating laws for the purpose of rebelling against federal authority, by areas in active rebellion against federal authority, is a self-nullifying legal proposition.

The only way to enforce them is by winning a war, not by signing legislation in Sacramento.

California, Chicago or Manhattan are no more entitled to protect their insurrectionist ‘sanctuaries’ for illegal alien criminals from federal law enforcement than Confederate forces were to shell Fort Sumter. Complaints about how ICE agents go about their work are a fig leaf that may pass muster with the type of federal district court judges that the ACLU has on speed dial, but won’t work at either a higher legal level let alone in an armed military confrontation.

Sanctuary state Democrats are playing a foolish game that can only end in a civil war.

If they actually try to send local police to arrest ICE agents, they will move to a Fort Sumter moment, and if they content themselves with building legal precedents, those same precedents can be turned around under a Democrat White House in ways they don’t seem to understand.

If blue states can harass and then outlaw one federal agency from operating, what stops red states from doing the same thing to the EPA, the IRS or the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division?

Democrats will predictably declare that’s somehow different because that would hurt them.

Politicians like Gov. Newsom and Gov. Pritzker are playing a double game, letting their radical base think that they’re escalating, while carefully avoiding a direct confrontation, but plenty of politicians on both sides were also playing that game before the Civil War. Demagoguery and virtue signaling weren’t invented last week. At some point the logic of escalation turns virtue signaling into the real thing and events, rushed by a few true believers, suddenly explode.

Democrats never supported legal immigration enforcement. They hid that in various ways over the years until the party and its base were so radicalized that not only fighting for open borders, but ignoring, rejecting and sabotaging immigration law enforcement became a political purity test. Democrats have reached the limit of what they can do legally to block enforcement.

The next step beyond that is a civil war.

If sanctuary Dems don’t back down, the remaining question is whether the civil war will start in California, Chicago or New York.