Earlier this month, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued an order that strikes at the heart of the effort by some cities and states to provide sanctuaries for immigrants who are in the U.S. without documentation. Bondi’s order of February 5 explicitly provides that those jurisdictions will be denied all Justice Department grants, but her press statements go well beyond that and suggest that the administration could deny all federal aid.

For good measure, a day later Bondi expressly targeted Illinois with a lawsuit arguing that the laws of Chicago, Cook County, and the state of Illinois "interfere with and discriminate against the Federal Government’s enforcement of federal immigration law in violation of the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution." And last week, Bondi filed a civil suit against the governor and attorney general of New York over the state’s sanctuary policies.

We have been here before. During Trump’s first administration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions sued California, charging that the state’s main sanctuary law, the California Values Act, is preempted by federal law, and that it "interferes with federal immigration authorities’ ability to carry out their responsibilities under federal law." But in 2019, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the California Values Act did not impede enforcement of federal immigration law. The Trump administration then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to take up the case, leaving the California Values Act intact.

While in other respects, Democrats have given in to Trump’s desires, there have been large pockets of resistance to his mass deportation agenda. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed two bills to protect immigrants. One appropriated $25 million for immigrant legal defense, and the other allocated another $25 million for Attorney General Rob Bonta to pursue litigation against the Trump administration.

In Chicago’s Little Village—a predominantly Hispanic community of around 70,000 on the city’s southwest side—ICE raids have been met with a well-organized counteraction: an urgent system of text chains, social media groups, and calls between local leaders. "Sanctuary cities are making it very difficult to arrest the criminals," Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, complained in an interview on CNN, specifically flagging Chicago. "They call it ‘Know your rights.’ I call it ‘How to escape arrest.’"

The ACLU and the immigrant rights group Make the Road New York filed suit in U.S. district court on January 22, arguing that Trump’s policies of "expedited removal" and summary deportation violate the due process rights of immigrants. That case is still pending.

Last Wednesday, the Denver public school system became the first school district to sue the Trump administration over its policy of allowing ICE agents in schools. And 27 religious groups have sued to block ICE from pursuing immigrants into churches.

That lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, holds that ICE raids in houses of worship, reversing long-standing federal policy, violate the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religion. "The rescission of the sensitive locations policy is already substantially burdening the religious exercise of Plaintiffs’ congregations and members. Congregations are experiencing decreases in worship attendance and social services participation due to fear of immigration enforcement action," the lawsuit says.

Unless Trump finds more corrupt mayors to cut deals for cooperation on deportations, he’ll still get a fight from Democrats opposed to these policies.

FOR CONSOLATION AND RECOLLECTION of better times, I recently watched Ken Burns’s superb documentary on the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France to commemorate the centenary of American democracy and the restoration of democracy in France. A decade after the statue was installed and dedicated, Emma Lazarus, a poet and activist aiding refugees, wrote her famous sonnet, "The New Colossus," soon inscribed on the statue’s base.

I learned the final stanza in grade school, and I hope you did, too.

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

You can only imagine what Trump might want to do to the poem and the statue—maybe turn it around to direct the wretched refuse to Guantanamo, or acquire the prime real estate from the Interior Department.

As we mark Presidents Day, this nation has to be better than Trump.

There was a time, incidentally, when "Presidents Day" was two holidays, marking the birthdays of two of our greatest and most honorable presidents, Lincoln (February 12), and Washington (February 22). In 1968, it was collapsed into a single holiday so that retailers could get another three-day weekend to promote shopping. One more debasement on the road to our current president.