A Honduran citizen allegedly detained by Houston police for more than two hours during a traffic stop before later being deported has sued the city over its policy governing how officers interact with federal immigration agents.
The filing is the latest development in a months-long fight between immigration advocates and Mayor John Whitmire’s administration over how officers respond when they encounter residents with civil immigration warrants, 700,000 of which officials in President Donald Trump’s administration added to a federal database last year.
The lawsuit alleges Houston police stopped Erick Lopez, 29, for a traffic violation on June 17 and held him for two hours. He was deported June 27, according to the filing.
“Erick has no criminal record,” said Lopez’s attorney, Randall Kallinen, in a press release. “He was supporting a girlfriend with two children, doing tile and other flooring work.”
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Earlier this year, the city council approved an ordinance that restricted Houston police officers’ interactions with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. The measure dictated that people with civil immigration warrants be released as soon as the original reason for the traffic stop was addressed, in keeping with legal experts’ and some police organizations’ interpretation of the Fourth Amendment.
But the council reversed that policy two weeks later, after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to pull $114 million in grant funding from the city.
Houston police have now returned to the policy they have used for most of Trump’s second term, with officers waiting a “reasonable” amount of time for ICE agents to pick up drivers detained with immigration warrants.
These warrants are civil, not criminal, documents, and do not by themselves give local police the authority to detain someone.
See here for some background on the City Council action. The Lorenzo Salgado Araujo story has faded a bit from the news, but that was never the only atrocity to be upset about. The story above is from Monday, here’s a followup from Tuesday after a press conference by attorney Kallinen.
By holding Lopez for two hours, Kallinen said, officers violated Lopez’s Fourth Amendment rights which protect people from excessive detention, regardless of citizenship status.
“The mayor and city council had a lot of debate about this, so they were fully aware of this going on prior to their final ordinance,” Kallinen said. “Yet we have all of these different cases which are violations of the Constitution, and when a government of any kind passes a law that doesn’t meet constitutional standards, the Constitution wins.”
The police department declined to comment, and referred reporters to the city’s legal department. Mayor John Whitmire’s office, which oversees the department, did not respond to a request for comment.
Travis Fife, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, said the city should have seen the lawsuit coming.
“This is the very thing we warned about months ago, that the city could’ve protected itself from by adopting and sticking to the ordinance passed limiting cooperation with immigration officials,” Fife said. “Instead, the city cowered under the governor’s threats. And now the plaintiff in this case has paid the ultimate cost of deportation. And the city is on the hook for the potentially huge monetary cost.”
Kallinen said that Lopez had lived in north Houston for about 10 years, and worked installing tiles to support his girlfriend and her two children.
Lopez was taken into custody on his birthday, after his family had cooked him dinner, his sister said. He is now back in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras.
“They should stop detaining innocent people. The police are there to take care of us, so that we can trust them and not be scared of them,” she said. “He just worked and went home, he wasn’t out in the streets.”
Kallinen said he is requesting a class action lawsuit in this case, pointing to HPD’s own reporting that indicates 103 other people were referred to immigration agents in the first quarter of 2026 alone, 19 of whom were taken into ICE custody.
I’m going to say what I’ve said about several other recent lawsuits, which is that I support this, I wish them all the best, but I am not optimistic about the likelihood of success. I’ll be happy to be proven wrong. Houston Public Media has more.