Back off, Mr. AG, from sanctuary cities' crime-fighting funding

Attorney General Jeff Sessions should know damn well what he can do with the threatening letters sent Wednesday to New York and 22 other so-called sanctuary cities, demanding they spool out the rope to hang themselves.

Sessions’ Department of Justice vows, for the umpteenth time, to nix crime-fighting grants to any localities that fail to show they cooperate with federal authorities as they root out undocumented immigrants with unprecedented viciousness.

With respect, Mr. Attorney General: Get bent.

It’s long been New York’s out-and-proud policy to refrain from handing over immigrants to the feds without a very good reason to do so — say, a dangerous criminal record or warrant. Hard experience taught the NYPD that the city is safer when immigrants know they can go to the police when they are victims of or witnesses to crimes.

Oh, and the Constitution plainly allows cities and states to make these calls for themselves.

Which is why a year ago, when President Trump tried to snatch potentially billions of federal dollars away from sanctuary cities with a sweeping executive order, federal judges blocked him.

This leaves Sessions with little power over city officials who refuse to be bullied into acting as agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Nonetheless, determined to turn immigrant roundups into national theater and at least look to be punishing uncooperative local officials, the attorney general has since last April clung to the thin reed of a single federal grant program named for NYPD Officer Edward Byrne, killed in the line of duty in 1988 as he stood guard in Queens to protect an immigrant witness to drug dealing.

The irony verges on sickening.

New York has far more at stake than the few million dollars a year the Byrne grants deliver: We have an exceedingly safe, exceedingly pro-immigrant city (the two are related) to defend here.

How silly, then, that de Blasio and other mayors set to meet with President Trump compromised their moral high ground with a snit fit and at the last minute pulled out of an Oval Office meeting on infrastructure crying “racist.”

One New Yorker to another, de Blasio should have told Trump what he thought to his face — and started necessary negotiations on funding bridges, tunnels and more.

Chuck Schumer among others knows how frustrating it is to try to deal with this President. But for the moment, he’s the one we’ve got.