Houston Mayor Orders Police to Curtail ICE Cooperation, Limiting Alerts to Jailable Offenses
Houston Mayor John Whitmire on November 6 signed an executive order directing the Houston Police Department to curtail its cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Reuters reported. Houston is in Harris County, Texas. Under the order, department personnel shall contact ICE regarding a person only if that person is already going to jail on new charges or other warrants and has a positive National Crime Information Center (NCIC) hit for an ICE administrative warrant.
The order states that the fact that 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 or hold any person in custody. In practice, a motorist stopped for a minor traffic infraction who receives a citation will no longer be referred to ICE solely because of an administrative warrant, Houston Police Chief J. Noe Diaz explained at the news conference; Diaz said he supported the change and that the department had already begun implementing it.
Whitmire said he took the action after consulting with the state's newly elected governor, lieutenant governor and comptroller, describing it as an effort to reduce fear and anxiety across all of Houston and remarking that "elections matter." He said the order enforces Senate Bill 4, which he opposed as a state senator, in line with its supporters' stated goal of cracking down on criminals who are in the country illegally.
The move came days after Democrats swept statewide races in Texas in the midterm elections; Republican Governor Greg Abbott lost his bid for a fourth term to Democrat Gina Hinojosa, who does not take office until January. In April, the Houston City Council passed an ordinance prohibiting officers from holding someone or extending a stop longer to wait for ICE, and Abbott threatened to withdraw about $110 million in public safety grants to Houston if it did not repeal the ordinance. Neither Abbott nor the Texas Attorney General's Office immediately responded to a request for comment on Friday's announcement.
Once a person is booked into the county jail, decisions about detention requests or coordination with federal authorities rest with Harris County rather than city police, and the order does not limit ICE's independent authority to operate in Houston.
(Source: Reuters)
Source: Reuters
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Photo: 图：Houston市政厅（GSM城市固定图库）。Warren LeMay 摄，CC BY-SA 4.0，经 Wikimedia Commons。 / Photo: Houston City Hall (GSM city asset library). By Warren LeMay, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
