What possible justification do Dems have for not letting ICE deport a sex offender?

You really can’t make it up.

A previously deported illegal immigrant named Gerardo Miguel Mora, whose rap sheet includes attempted rape and strangulation, was back in a New York City courtroom last week on a shoplifting charge, which, according to The Post, was his second arrest in the month of January — the first being for crack possession.

That’s actually not the unbelievable part of the story.

The reason Mora’s most recent criminal case made news is that New York City Judge Sheridan Jack-Browne allowed him to waltz right out of the courthouse despite being made aware of a federal criminal warrant for Mora’s arrest.

The result was that, upon realizing that Mora had been released, federal agents had to chase him down and take him into custody on the street.

Crisis averted?

For now . . . maybe.

Mora’s release does not seem to have been an oversight, but rather a deliberate choice meant to make it possible for him to evade federal authorities.

The question New York City doesn’t seem willing to answer is: Why not hand him over?

Having been previously deported, Mora has no legal right to be in New York (or any other part of the country, for that matter).

His presence in New York has clearly been detrimental to the city’s residents: After all, the city and state’s official position is that Mora is in fact a criminal, which is why he’s being prosecuted.

Given his priors, it seems unlikely Mora will suddenly desist from his life of crime and become a net contributor to society.

Allowing federal authorities to take custody of Mora and offenders like him in a controlled environment would spare the city from having to expend further resources to prosecute and continue to police Mora’s criminal misconduct.

It would also protect law-abiding city residents from the criminal victimizations Mora can reasonably be expected to inflict.

And it would reduce the chances of federal agents having to use force to get the person they’re after into custody if they end up running or violently resisting.

Moreover, allowing the feds to take custody of Mora would spare New York Democrats the embarrassment of having to defend a bail policy that would put a repeat offender — one with a past that includes a violent sex offense — on the street rather than in pretrial detention.

What, exactly, is the downside here?

Who benefits from a decision like the one that released Mora?

Democrats won’t say.

There are two other questions worth investigating here.

The first is whether, by allowing Mora to make a run for it, Judge Jack-Browne committed the same criminal offense of obstruction that Milwaukee judge Hannah C. Dugan was just recently convicted of in federal criminal court.

The second is whether Jack-Browne received any guidance on what to do with the warrant for Mora’s arrest, or if she acted alone.

If she acted on the advice of official counsel from a city agency, that would be an especially troubling development.

While the city is already bound by a sanctuary policy that prohibits it from actively assisting in any federal immigration enforcement matter, knowingly helping an offender evade federal authorities is a horse of a different color — and would constitute a major scandal.

There would be no other way to couch active participation in an effort to help an offender evade federal authorities (especially one with a criminal warrant) as anything but an escalation of the ongoing disputes between the Trump administration and officials in cities like Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Chicago.

New York City has already gotten a taste of the chaos we’ve seen in those cities.

One would think our leaders would be trying to bring the temperature down.

Instead, however, they seem hell-bent on courting more unrest.

Which brings us back to the original question: Why?

Rafael A. Mangual is the Nick Ohnell Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a contributing editor of City Journal, and author of the 2022 book “Criminal (In)Justice.”