Let’s start here, which I think frames the issue in the best practical terms.
Mayor John Whitmire’s denials finally hit a wall. When he first took office, the mayor said the Houston Police Department wasn’t working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Then he said they were, but only to the extent necessary under the law.
On Wednesday, in a press conference with Police Chief Noe Diaz, Whitmire revealed that HPD officials went out of their way to personally deliver immigrants they arrested to ICE agents 17 times last year.
That may not be a lot, especially in a city of millions where police field hundreds of thousands of calls each year. But it went above and beyond Houston’s guidelines on administrative warrants — the non-criminal immigration warrants the Trump administration dumped into police databases. Those HPD guidelines advised officers only to call ICE and wait “a reasonable amount of time” for an agent to come to the scene, not to hand-deliver someone they arrested.
We applaud the mayor’s newfound transparency. We wish it didn’t come only after the Chronicle reported on two of those instances last week, prompting outcry from City Council members unsatisfied with Whitmire’s response.
[…]
Under the new HPD guidelines, when an officer gets a hit for an administrative warrant, a sergeant must now be called to the scene to verify it. Then, the officer must wait 30 minutes to see if federal agents show up. If they don’t, the person is released.
Officers won’t transport anyone solely based on an immigration warrant — though, Diaz clarified, they can move people to “safer” locations, say, a park if they’re stranded on a highway.
Let’s be clear about what this is: It’s a decision to pay Houston police officers to sit on their hands when they should be answering 911 calls, solving homicides, assaults and rape cases.
Whitmire has repeatedly stressed putting more boots on the ground to tackle crime — even prompting Diaz to disband HPD’s community affairs division to put more officers on patrol. Yet, he’s now doubling down on a policy that pulls officers off the beat to act as an unpaid concierge service for the feds.
If an oil and gas executive owes an EPA fine, does HPD drag them out of a skyscraper? If a restaurateur has a stack of health code violations, does an officer wait by the industrial fridge for 30 minutes to see if a city inspector wants to show up?
Of course not. That isn’t police work. It never has been.
[…]
As Whitmire pats himself on the back for being “smart” on immigration, other Texas cities have somehow found smarter ways to delineate where their local law enforcement ends and federal immigration enforcement begins.
Dallas, for example, has strictly prohibited enforcing administrative warrants. And in La Porte, police officers can’t detain subjects while they wait for ICE unless they’re suspected of a separate criminal violation.
Why can’t Houston do the same?
City Council must refuse to be sidelined by this latest directive. They should follow Dallas’ lead, passing an ordinance explicitly ensuring that police work means solving local crimes, not moonlighting for federal agencies — especially ones that seem to have little regard for public wellbeing or rule of law. HPD should not be enforcing administrative warrants unless there is a separate criminal offense.
See here for the previous update, with links to earlier ones. I was going to write something about the responses to Whitmire’s response about HPD hand-delivering people to ICE, but there were so many stories that followed that I kept putting it off so I could compile them into one post. In the end, that Chron editorial did a good job of summarizing how I felt about it, with less emotion and bombast but still enough righteousness. I would very much like to see City Council force this issue – surely there are three members to put forth an agenda item – even if there aren’t enough votes to make it into an ordinance. Don’t let the Mayor off the hook, he doesn’t deserve it.