ICE to N.Y.: Drop dead

The detention and imminent deportation by immigration agents of Pablo Villavicencio is an exclamation point on federal policies so aggressive, so indiscriminate, so cruel, so wasteful, so contrary to human decency that they insult the basic American values President Trump purports to uphold.

Villavicencio, husband of an American citizen, father to two young daughters, last week became prey to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents whose only objective seems to be to tearing as many people as possible from their homes and communities, utterly contrary to the presidential promise to prioritize removal of “bad hombres.”

The 35-year-old man’s sin was delivering a pizza to a Brooklyn Army base, where a guard saw his New York City identification card rather than a driver’s license, ran a background check — and, finding an active ICE warrant, called the cavalry.

Yes, Villavicencio entered the country illegally way back when. Yes, he agreed to voluntarily leave in 2010. But the man has no criminal record to speak of; he supports his family; he does his job and pays taxes. His mere presence is his only crime. This warrants separation from a wife and 2-year-old and 3-year-old girls only in a nation that has lost its moral bearings.

Fishermen are told to throw small fish back into the sea, and only to put the larger ones on ice. ICE now makes a mockery of that ethic, costing taxpayers an average of $12,000 per life upended. In 2017, it arrested noncriminal immigrants at a rate approaching double the previous year.

For 18 months now, Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio have asserted New York’s federalist right to protect its otherwise law-abiding undocumented immigrants from removal. The New York Police Department will not aid and abet this madness, nor will hospitals or public schools. Lawyers funded by the city and state help those seized navigate the Kafkaesque immigration bureaucracy. And ICE is banned from making warrantless arrests in state facilities.

Do more.