Justice Department targets 65 officials for holding ICE accountable, holds none of its own accountable.

…(cont) On November 2nd, Truthout filled in the rest of the assembly: since January, the House Judiciary Committee and the Justice Department have targeted sixty-five state and local officials for trying to hold ICE accountable. Not the officers. The people asking about the officers.

Then, on October 30th, a grand jury in Harris County, Texas — a county, not the Department — indicted ICE officer Mario Alberto Morales on a felony count of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, for allegedly driving his SUV into Miguel Parra, a man who had lived in the state for decades and spent weeks afterward in the hospital. Washington didn't ask Harris County to do this. The county reached for the plain tool every county already owns and used it on a federal officer exactly the way it uses it on anyone else. The tinkerer took the whole mechanism apart afterward just to check: a grand jury hears what happened, decides a crime occurred, indicts. No new law required. No list of sixty-five. It's the one gear in this machine that still turns when you crank it.

On Monday, Morales turned himself in and was released on bond — a year-plus into the job, NBC noted, in the middle of what reporters are calling Trump's hiring surge, now itself under review. The muscle's job here was simple: clear away the obstruction — the stalled evidence, the sixty-five names — so the pilot could see what was actually left standing. One grand jury. One county. Zero help from the agency whose whole job this is supposed to be.

The Justice Department owns the identical tool — authority to prosecute, the practice of sharing what it collects with the states doing the same work. It used neither this year. Harris County used its copy without waiting to be asked. The fix the crew is pricing out isn't exotic: give the Department the same orders it already gave the county, for free, with no memo required.