Houston Mayor John Whitmire on Friday ordered the city's police department to sharply curtail its cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, directing officers to stop alerting federal agents during routine stops — a move he tied directly to this week's Democratic sweep in Texas.
Under the executive order, Houston police conducting traffic stops or other detentions may no longer contact ICE solely because of a civil immigration warrant against the person stopped. Officers may notify ICE only if the person is also being arrested and charged with committing a jailable offense. Houston Police Chief J. Noe Diaz backed the change and said his department had already begun to implement it. “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,” Diaz said. “HPD will no longer contact ICE if they have an administrative warrant and they are not arrested.”
Whitmire said he acted after consulting with the state's newly elected governor, lieutenant governor and comptroller, and framed the order as a response to Tuesday's results. “This is the right thing to do at the right time,” Whitmire, a Democrat, said at a news conference announcing the order. “I do this to begin a healing process,” he added, saying he hoped his executive order would become a model for other Texas cities. In a statement, he said he had signed an executive order “directing HPD to no longer contact ICE for nonviolent offenses, helping reduce fear in our communities.”
The order lands three days after an election in which Democrats won statewide leadership in Texas for the first time in decades, with Democrat Gina Hinojosa defeating Republican Gov. Greg Abbott's bid for a fourth term, and Democrats reclaiming majorities in both chambers of Congress. Whitmire said the order enforces Senate Bill 4, the 2017 Texas law banning so-called sanctuary city policies that he opposed as a state senator, in line with its supporters' stated goal of cracking down on criminals who are in the country illegally.
Months ago, Abbott threatened to withhold at least $110 million in public safety grants when the Houston City Council sought an ordinance giving officers discretion not to notify ICE, and city officials retreated, with Whitmire arguing at the time that the city had no choice but to comply. On Friday, he said Tuesday's elections had changed the political equation and that he was no longer concerned about retribution from the lame-duck Abbott administration. An ordinance the council passed in April already bars officers from holding someone or extending a stop longer to wait for ICE.
According to the department's first two reports, officers contacted ICE nearly 200 times from April through September, including at least 36 instances in which Houston police handed people directly to federal custody. The order does not stop ICE from carrying out its own enforcement in the city, and the Department of Homeland Security criticized the move. It also comes after a summer in which federal immigration officers fatally shot a Mexican homebuilder in Houston. The announcement came the same day President Donald Trump promoted Stephen Miller, the architect of his toughest immigration policies, to White House chief of staff.
