Earlier this month, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed a bill that would, among other things, establish clearer and more severe civil liabilities for immigration agents and their collaborators violating state law by, for example, arresting people at or on their way to state courthouses without a judicial warrant. The bill was a response to the temporary siege of the federal “Midway Blitz” operation, which saw agents from multiple agencies, including heavily armed Border Patrol units, engaged in wanton, violent roundups and speech suppression.

It stopped short, however, of touching a notion Pritzker had first raised in mid-October: state and local prosecutors taking criminal action against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agents violating state law. Nonetheless, the idea of prosecutors bringing charges against immigration agents is slowly making its way into mainstream discourse as the Trump administration’s popularity craters and the full scope of its authoritarian designs increasingly comes into focus. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner had raised the issue all the way back in January, in the early days of Trump’s second term. This month, typically staid Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton, after a visit to a local ICE detention facility, bluntly said, “The abuses of ICE need to be prosecuted.”

Stephen Miller has already tried to preempt this idea with the false claim that federal agents have blanket immunity. It is true that the exact scope and ability to hold them accountable is a matter unsettled in the law, but it is not a new conversation. In fact, as this has bubbled up again, I’ve been thinking of the first time I ever seriously discussed this issue, with Fordham Law professor and then-candidate for New York attorney general Zephyr Teachout, who made it a campaign plank at a time when it was seen as a pretty fringe position: the apex of the already marginal push to abolish ICE, a mantle that had been taken up by national figures........

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