The mayor of Houston has ordered the city’s police force to sharply limit its cooperation with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in one of the first major policy shifts since Democrats swept statewide offices in Texas for the first time in decades.
Key Points
- Mayor John Whitmire signed an executive order on Friday directing Houston police to contact ICE only for jailable offences.
- Officers will no longer alert ICE over a civil immigration warrant alone, including during routine traffic stops.
- Whitmire said he acted after consulting Texas’s newly elected governor, lieutenant governor and comptroller.
- The move reverses a policy Whitmire adopted in April under pressure from outgoing Republican Governor Greg Abbott.
Under the new rules, Houston police will contact ICE only when a person is being arrested for a jailable offence and has an ICE administrative warrant. “For example, if our police officers pull someone over for a minor traffic infraction and they write a citation, that person receives a citation and goes about their day,” Houston Police Chief Noe Diaz said. “HPD will no longer contact ICE if they have an administrative warrant and they are not arrested.” The order states that the fact a person is, or is suspected to be, subject to immigration enforcement “shall not, by itself, be a basis to contact ICE, to prolong any detention, or to take any person into or hold any person in custody”.
“Elections matter”
Whitmire, a Democrat, said the change was about “reducing fear and anxiety, not just within certain communities, but across all of Houston”, adding: “As I’ve said many times, elections matter.” He said he had consulted the state’s newly elected leaders before acting, and described the order as the start of “a healing process”. In a statement on Friday afternoon, he wrote: “I have signed an executive order directing HPD to no longer contact ICE for nonviolent offenses, helping reduce fear in our communities.”
The decision is a direct consequence of Tuesday’s midterm elections, in which Democrats won every statewide office in Texas and flipped several congressional seats held by Republicans. Democrat Gina Hinojosa ousted Governor Greg Abbott, who lost his bid for a fourth term, and will become Texas’s first Latina governor and the first Democrat to hold the office in more than 30 years.
A reversal of the April policy
The new order reverses a policy Whitmire put in place in April, when the City Council passed an ordinance limiting police cooperation with ICE and Abbott threatened to withdraw about $110 million in public safety grants to Houston if it was not repealed. Whitmire and Chief Diaz then restored greater discretion for officers to contact ICE about civil immigration warrants. Friday’s order returns the city to the restrictions lawmakers originally sought, and Whitmire said it enforces the state’s Senate Bill 4 in line with its stated goal of cracking down on criminals who are in the country illegally.
Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city and the most populous in Texas, has been a focal point of the federal government’s aggressive immigration enforcement. Chief Diaz said his department had already begun implementing the new policy. Hinojosa does not take office until January, and it remains to be seen how the outgoing Abbott administration and the federal government will respond. For the wider midterm result behind the shift, see our report on Democrats sweeping the midterms to win the House and Senate, and for an earlier Houston immigration case, Texas grand jury indicts ICE officer for Houston assault. More in our US News section.
Sources: Al Jazeera, “Houston mayor curbs cooperation of US city’s police with ICE”; Reuters, “Houston mayor curtails police cooperation with ICE, saying ‘elections matter’”.