Why can’t Maryland at least begin an investigation into Abrego Garcia’s arrest for the crime of kidnapping? What’s stopping California Attorney General Rob Bonta or Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman or LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell from at least investigating the DHS agents who showed up at two elementary schools last week seeking access to five small children—the oldest in sixth grade, the youngest in first grade—on the pretext that they were checking into the children’s welfare? Fortunately, the schools’ principals denied them entry into their schools. The agents lied that the children’s families had authorized them to proceed, though the schools, which checked with their parents, found that not to be true. Subsequently questioned by the Los Angeles Times about the incident, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said that the children had arrived as unaccompanied minors, which they had not (and which contradicted the other cover story that they were with their families). Not just the arrival of these DHS agents, but also their fictitious cover stories, should suffice to enable local police agencies to question if the real goal was to seize the children and thus pressure their parents, who may or may not have been immigrants, to come forward.

Suspicion of kidnapping? Suspicion of the child abuse inherent in putting a first grader under lock and key? Is that too much of a stretch?

I’d argue that when the federal government stretches to violate constitutional rights, state and local governments must stretch to defend them. Abraham Lincoln would understand. In the opening days of the Civil War, when pro-Confederate Marylanders were working to block pro-Union militias from New York and other points north from hastening down to Washington to defend an as-yet undefended federal government, Lincoln ordered the army to make arrests of the Confederates destroying the rail lines on which those militias were traveling, and hold those suspects without the right to habeas corpus. A serious infringement on Americans’ constitutional rights, as he acknowledged, even if those arrested were seeking to effectively abolish the American nation. In defense of his action, Lincoln famously wrote, “Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?”

Today, all the laws that have protected the nation from the arbitrary rule of a lawless president are increasingly going unexecuted. It’s time for state and local governments to invoke their own laws to preserve American democracy. And it’s time for their constituents to demand this of them.