Last week, police arrested two teenagers, Josue Fuentes-Ponce and Joel Escobar, and charged them with the murder of 14 year-old Ariana Funes-Diaz. She was killed in a tunnel, beaten with a baseball bat and slashed with a machete. She was found naked. Reportedly, the killers, members of MS-13, ordered her to strip before they murdered her.

According to authorities, Fuentes-Ponce and Escobar killed the girl because they were worried she would report them to police. She had lured a man to Northwest Washington, D.C., where he was beaten, robbed, and interrogated about his gang affiliations.

This was not the first involvement in a robbery by Fuentes-Ponce and Escobar. Last year, both were arrested in connection with a robbery case.

Because Fuentes-Ponce and Escobar are in the U.S. illegally, ICE asked the Prince George’s County, Maryland Department of Corrections to detain them. It did not. Thus, these two MS-13 thugs were free to commit more robberies and to butcher a 14 year-old accomplice.

An ICE spokeswoman said this:

It’s hard to imagine that anyone would not be interested in ensuring that people like this are not on the streets, doing bad things, after demonstratively violent behavior.

Apparently, though, the interest in thwarting immigration enforcement overrides any interest in public safety.

The detention facility that held Fuentes-Ponce claims it did not directly receive a request to detain him at the time he was due to be released. But ICE had asked the Prince George’s County Department of Corrections to detain him.

This was no bureaucratic foul-up, however. Maryland officials admit that holding these two criminal illegal immigrants would have violated state guidelines. In other words, it is Maryland state policy not to cooperate with ICE in keeping the public safe from vicious illegal immigrants like Fuentes-Ponce and Escobar.

And Maryland is hardly alone in its resistance to immigration enforcement.

President Trump campaigned as the one presidential candidate who would put an end to these kinds of outrages. Members of families with loved ones killed by illegal immigrants featured prominently at the Republican National Convention and at other campaign events.

It is clear, however, that Trump cannot fulfill this and other immigration-related promises as things currently stand. Resistance by Democrat controlled states and localities and by the federal judiciary prevents him from doing so. Only by disobeying injunctions issued by single left-liberal district court judges, but applicable to the entire nation, can Trump make serious headway.

Thus far, despite claims that he’s a dictator or “king,” Trump has complied with every court order that has been issued. However, sooner or later I suspect he will be sorely tempted to resist the judicial resistance.