Houston Police Stop Calling ICE Over Warrants When No One Is Arrested

Houston Police Department (HPD) officers will no longer contact U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) about a person who has an ICE administrative warrant but is not being arrested, under an executive order Mayor John Whitmire signed Friday. Officers will call ICE only when they arrest someone for a jailable offense and that person also has an ICE warrant, Police Chief J. Noe Diaz said in the city’s announcement. Diaz’s example was a minor traffic stop that ends with a citation.

“HPD will no longer contact ICE if they have an administrative warrant and they are not arrested,” Diaz said. Whitmire said the order is “about reducing fear and anxiety, not just within certain communities, but across all of Houston,” and that “I will take responsibility for making this change.” Diaz sent a memo to the whole department to put it into effect.

Whitmire tied the timing to Tuesday’s election, in which Gina Hinojosa defeated Gov. Greg Abbott. “I also do this knowing that elections matter,” he told reporters, the Texas Tribune reported. He also named the cost. The city depends on state and federal grants, he said, according to KPRC, and “I understand there’s risk.”

Austin is moving more slowly. Mayor Kirk Watson has asked Police Chief Lisa Davis to rewrite the department’s general orders on ICE so that the changes can take effect when Hinojosa takes office in January, KUT reported. “With the change in state leadership, I anticipate being able to better partner with the state on issues,” Watson said. For now, Austin officers still contact ICE about an administrative warrant “when operationally feasible,” and Watson said the city will keep following state law, according to KUT.

That law is Senate Bill 4, which the Legislature passed in 2017 and which sits in Chapter 752 of the Government Code. It forbids a city or its police department to adopt or enforce a policy that “prohibits or materially limits the enforcement of immigration laws,” and it counts “an informal, unwritten policy” as a policy. Any resident can file a sworn complaint with the attorney general, who can then ask a court to order the city to comply. The civil penalty is $1,000 to $1,500 for a first violation and $25,000 to $25,500 for each one after that, and every day a violation continues counts as a new one. An officeholder who breaks the ban forfeits the office, and the attorney general must go to court to remove that official when given evidence of the violation. A separate article of the Code of Criminal Procedure requires jails to honor ICE detainers. Houston’s order covers officers on the street dealing with administrative warrants, not detainers.

Houston went through the same dispute in the spring. In April the City Council ended a 30-minute hold that kept drivers at traffic stops while officers waited to hear from ICE, and Attorney General Ken Paxton sued city officials on April 16. “Under my watch, no Texas city will be a safe harbor for illegals,” Paxton said that day. Abbott threatened to withhold about $110 million in public safety grants from the city, the Tribune reported. By Saturday morning neither Abbott’s office nor Paxton’s had issued a statement on Friday’s order.

Both mayors are acting on a change in who holds office, and the statute has not changed. Rewriting Chapter 752 would take a bill through both chambers of a Legislature that convenes January 12, with Republicans holding 19 of the 31 seats in the Texas Senate by KPRC’s count. What does change in January is who answers the complaints. Paxton leaves the attorney general’s office then, and the decision whether to take Houston to court under the law he enforced in April passes to his successor.