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The editorial in today’s Washington Post denounced the Trump administration’s flouting of the court order to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia—the Maryland resident the administration acknowledges it wrongfully deported to a Salvadoran prison—to the United States. Raising the distinct possibility that Abrego Garcia could be tortured or killed while there, the editorial concludes, "If anything happens while this legal fight drags on, the Trump administration will have blood on its hands."

Not coincidentally, in my inbox today was a message from Maryland Gov. Wes Moore also condemning Trump’s refusal to heed the court, noting that "it has the potential to serve as a dangerous precedent for what Trump can get away with." Moore’s message concludes with this bold-type declaration: "I will not stand idly by as this administration disappears Americans to foreign prisons."

Unfortunately, Moore doesn’t spell out what he’ll actually do, nor does the Post suggest a way to compel the administration to bring Abrego Garcia back. In this, they have plenty of company. The number of patently illegal or unconstitutional actions the administration has taken in the not quite three months since January 20th is well into the hundreds, ranging from usurpations of Congress’s power to establish, abolish, fund, and defund agencies and programs, to the violations of Americans’ rights to privacy (data seizure) and habeas corpus, to ignoring court orders. Other than contesting such actions in the courts, however, elected officials, the emerging resistance, and just plain patriots of good faith have failed to find ways to stop or even slow America’s abrupt transformation into a police state. And when the administration draws out court proceedings until it’s too late to stop its outrages, or just flouts court rulings outright, that means we’ve become powerless to preserve the democratic precepts on which our government, however imperfectly, has been based.

Hence, the question increasingly sounded across the nation as the administration’s trashing of the rights Americans have historically enjoyed increases with each passing day: Is there anything we can do to actually stop this?

Well, we do live in a federal republic. So long as congressional Republicans remain Trump’s lapdogs, he controls two branches of the federal government and increasingly ignores the third. He does not control state governments or county or city governments, however, and they have justice systems and police powers of their own.

That should open a door for Gov. Moore or Maryland’s attorney general. The Department of Homeland Security’s flouting of a unanimous Supreme Court certainly exposes its secretary, Kristi Noem, and underlings like Tom Homan to contempt-of-court charges, albeit on a federal level. But there’s an action that underlay and precipitated that contempt: the seizure of Abrego Garcia. Crimes committed under the color of law have been found to be crimes, as the murderer of George Floyd and numerous miscreant cops can attest. And the states almost surely have their own habeas corpus guarantees in their constitutions.

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.