Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, during an appearance on Fox News last weekend, noted businesses and public places in Chicago are resistant to serving ICE officers or even allowing ICE personnel to use public restrooms.

The cold shoulder is likely frustrating — though not as alarming as some of the vitriol and disorder expressed toward ICE, including calls to “abolish” the federal agency.

The American people have legitimate reasons to expect the federal government will monitor who immigrates to the U.S. and whether their presence here is a sincere effort to join and contribute to American society or a willingness to exist on the criminal fringes, in ways detrimental to communities.

We continue, as we expressed in a March editorial, to have reservations that the federal government is doing enough to ensure people detained have their God-given rights to due process and to contest the allegation that they are in the country illegally respected.

Our editorial position, expressed numerous times over many years, is that the three branches of federal government and the American people should work to ensure legal immigration is truly a successful pathway for men, women and families joining the one country where those God-given individual rights are a foundational principle and not arbitrarily bureaucratic, burdensome and time-consuming.

But, as we have likewise editorialized numerous times over many years, illegal immigrants — immigrants who make no attempt or effort at obtaining legal status and continually defy the principle that the government should have any oversight of immigration — should be identified and deported.

The idea that ICE could or should be abolished is extremism. The idea that communities should resist any compliance or assistance of ICE and other federal authorities — even letting them use a public restroom — is extremism. Protesting not the excesses of immigration enforcement in the absence of sincere reform of legal immigration but the existence of any order or authority to determine who is in our nation is extremism.

We hope that reason, moderation and the nation’s founding principles can prevail over the extremism of acrimony directed at the very concept that any illegal immigrant might deserve to be deported.