Three Houston council members file ordinance to lock in HPD limits on ICE contact
Houston City Hall from Hermann Square. Photo: Ed Uthman, Houston, Texas, USA, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Three Houston City Council members filed an ordinance Monday that would write Mayor John Whitmire’s new limits on police contact with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement into city law, so a future mayor could not undo them with the stroke of a pen.
Council Members Alejandra Salinas (At-Large 4), Edward Pollard (District J) and Tiffany Thomas (District F) are using Proposition A, the 2023 charter amendment that lets any three council members put an item on the agenda, a power otherwise held by the mayor. Under that process the city legal department gets a week to review the proposal and decide whether it is lawful, the Houston Chronicle reported. No council vote has been scheduled.
What the mayor’s order already does
Whitmire signed Executive Order 1-74 on Friday, Nov. 6. It tells HPD officers to contact ICE about someone only if that person is already going to jail on new charges or other warrants and also turns up with an ICE administrative warrant in the national crime database. Being suspected of an immigration violation cannot, by itself, be a reason to call ICE, hold someone longer or take them into custody. The order also directs Police Chief Noe Diaz to issue a circular making sure nobody is held in the field just so ICE can pick them up.
In practice, Diaz said, a driver who gets a ticket on a minor traffic stop and is released goes on their way even if an administrative ICE warrant shows up, FOX 26 reported. Administrative warrants are civil documents issued by immigration authorities, not by judges.
What the ordinance would add
Beyond making the order permanent, the proposal would add detail to the quarterly ICE reports council required HPD to start filing earlier this year. Each report would have to show the reason for any jail booking, whether the person ICE was contacted about was a victim, witness or suspect, and a short summary of each encounter, KPRC 2 reported.
The most recent HPD report, covering July through September, gives a sense of scale. Officers ran 292,975 person checks in the quarter. Of those, 88 led to an immigration-related database hit or ICE contact. Fifty-eight people were released at the scene, 17 were transferred to ICE and 13 were jailed on charges unrelated to immigration. The average detention in those cases was 46 minutes.
“It would codify the protections in the mayor’s executive order into city law to ensure they endure far beyond any one administration,” the three council members said in a joint statement.
Where the mayor stands
Whitmire’s office told FOX 26 that he stands by Friday’s order but believes adding more provisions to the city ordinance “would put the City of Houston at even greater risk of violating state law.” That is a reference to Senate Bill 4, the 2017 Texas law, now in Chapter 752 of the Government Code, that bars local governments from adopting policies that prohibit or materially limit the enforcement of immigration laws. The mayor’s office said he is looking to incoming state leaders to revisit the law.
The timing matters at City Hall. Whitmire’s order came days after last week’s midterm elections, and immigration enforcement has been one of the most contested issues on the council since federal authorities added hundreds of thousands of civil ICE warrants to the national police database last year. Earlier this year council approved a measure that barred officers from prolonging traffic stops over those warrants and ended the practice of waiting up to 30 minutes for ICE to arrive. The new proposal would sit on top of that.
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