When Dallas Police Chief Daniel Comeaux rejected an invitation to join the federal 287(g) immigration enforcement program, he made the right call, and the timing could not be more consequential.

At the very moment local law enforcement across Texas is being asked to wield federal immigration authority, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, the nation’s most powerful guardian of equal justice, is being systematically dismantled. That retreat from police reform oversight means that when things go wrong in programs like 287(g), there is increasingly no federal watchdog left to step in.

The division has withdrawn from major police reform cases and abandoned consent decrees designed to correct “patterns and practices” of unconstitutional policing in cities such as Minneapolis, Louisville and Phoenix.

Its attorney ranks have been gutted, its litigation paused and one of........

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