Institutions won’t save us. This is a lesson that Constitution-abiding Americans keep learning the hard way.

The Senate won’t convict a president who has committed high crimes. The Supreme Court will give an insurrectionist president a free pass and grant him king-like immunity. The criminal justice system fails to impose any accountability against a politically powerful felon.

Coloradans can count the governor’s office as yet another institution that won’t save them from the Trump administration’s cruelty and lawlessness. As became clear this week in testimony before a Denver District Court judge, Colorado Governor Jared Polis, at least on some crucial matters, is on team MAGA.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in April sent an administrative subpoena to the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment seeking personal information that could improperly expose dozens of residents to immigration enforcement. Colorado has laws that prohibit state personnel from sharing personal identifying information with federal immigration officers except in response to a court-issued subpoena or to assist with a federal criminal investigation.

Polis had ordered that the information be released to ICE, claiming that disclosure was justified under the state law’s criminal-investigation exception.

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A top CDLE manager, Scott Moss, brought a whistleblower lawsuit against Polis to stop what he said would be illegal disclosures. A judge on Wednesday sided with Moss.

A witness on Polis’ side seemed to substantiate Moss’ case during testimony. CDLE director Joe Barela acknowledged under questioning in court that he knew of no evidence that the information sought in the subpoena had anything to do with a criminal investigation. And when Polis lawyer Thomas Rogers III continued to insist that the subpoena was related to a criminal investigation, even Judge A. Bruce Jones had had enough.

“Am I going to believe you or my own lying eyes?” he said.

The judge’s eyes could see the subpoena itself. It was titled “Immigration Enforcement Subpoena.” It was an administrative document and did not come from a court. It sought extensive personal information, including work and medical records, of 35 people identified as sponsors of unaccompanied child immigrants.

The only mention in the subpoena of a crime was so open-ended as to be meaningless. It said that Homeland Security Investigations, an agency within ICE, was “conducting investigative activities” to locate unaccompanied immigrant children to ensure they’re not the victims of “crimes,” such as human trafficking.

That’s not a criminal investigation. Not in the legal sense. Not according to common sense. That’s a fishing expedition.

But Polis is on board with it.

No pursuit of the Trump administration so exemplifies its lawlessness and cruelty so much as its immigration enforcement program, which has terrorized communities, stripped residents of due process rights, disappeared people to a brutal foreign prison, targeted individuals who have done nothing more than express a disfavored opinion, and resulted in the arrest of elected officials.

Leaders of Trump’s mass deportation effort originally claimed that it would target violent criminals, but its implementation shows that anyone without residency authorization is at risk, no matter how long they’ve lived in America, no matter how clean their record, no matter how much they’ve contributed to their communities. This week a whistleblower revealed that it was federal Justice Department policy to ignore court orders and withhold information in immigration enforcement cases.

In other words, immigration officials have repeatedly acted in bad faith, yet Polis has chosen to give them the benefit of the doubt. This has come at great cost to Coloradans — not just the countless families in the state who might fear that masked government goons at any time could kidnap one of their own off the street, but also the tens of thousands of residents who grieve the erosion of constitutional order and have registered their fear and anger by marching in multiple protests against ICE’s unaccountable behavior.

As Trump’s return to the presidency approached, many Coloradans took some comfort in assuming that leaders like Polis, a Democrat leading a blue state, might provide some protection against the fascist abuses they suspected, correctly, would issue from Washington. But early on there were ominous indications that Polis was aligned with MAGA, not least the president’s immigration enforcement program. Now it’s clear Polis has made the governor’s office an extension of that program.

Institutions won’t save us. When individual Coloradans take to the streets to demonstrate in opposition to Trump’s authoritarian outrages, they would be justified in including the Colorado governor’s office as an object of protest.