As he campaigned for Houston mayor three years ago, John Whitmire repeatedly leaned on his Austin connections after serving five decades in the Capitol, first as a state representative and then as a senator, to pitch himself as a peacemaker following years of GOP state leaders clashing with the city’s Democratic leaders.
“They’re ready to sit down and see how they can assist Houston,” the veteran Democrat said after he won the election. “From day one, there is going to be much better cooperation between the state and the city, and Houston will benefit.”
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This week that collaborative spirit imploded into a controversy over the Houston Police Department’s role in immigration enforcement.
Days after the Houston City Council — with Whitmire’s support — ratified an ordinance to minimize Houston police cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Texas attorney general’s office launched an investigation into the city that could lead to an effort to remove local officials from office.
Then the governor’s office told the city it is on the brink of losing more $100 million in funding because the ordinance violates state grant agreements.
The political whirlwind encapsulates a tension simmering in city halls across the state’s left-leaning urban cores. From McAllen to Dallas, residents infuriated with President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown are demanding their city leaders take action to protect them and their neighbors from ICE.
But those elected officials are largely limited in what they can do by a 2017 state law that sought to ban “sanctuary cities,” and they may not want to invite scrutiny from state leaders — who support Trump’s immigration crackdown — or the White House, which last year directed federal prosecutors to probe any local officials who obstruct the president’s mass deportation effort.
In Houston, Whitmire called a special meeting scheduled for Friday for the city council to reconsider the immigration order — which nullifies a police policy requiring officers to hold people for ICE — following the governor’s threat to cancel state public safety funding.
“It does not matter what a council member’s legal opinion is,” Whitmire told reporters Tuesday. “There’s only one opinion that matters, and that’s the governor’s.”
Feds used civil warrants to flag undocumented immigrants
Houston is not the only city under state leaders’ microscope for a local immigration policy but it is the recipient of the most aggressive state response during Trump’s second term.
The origins of the friction trace back to the president’s first term, when Democrat-run cities and counties often emerged as the loudest critics and opponents to Trump’s immigration policies, and many instructed their police departments to avoid cooperating with federal immigration authorities — for example, by refusing to hold undocumented immigrants in local jails until ICE can pick them up for deportation.
In 2017, amid that local pushback, the state Legislature passed a law that prohibited local officials from creating policies that did not let police officers ask people about their legal status or work with federal immigration authorities. Under the law, known as Senate Bill 4, the attorney general is required to try booting violators from office by filing a petition in court, leading to a hearing on whether the official should be removed from office.
When Trump returned to the White House last year and launched a nationwide mass deportation effort, one of the ways his administration sought to use local police to help find and apprehend undocumented immigrants was by adding hundreds of thousands of federal immigration warrants — which are typically civil offenses — to a crime database routinely used by police across the nation.
“If they pop up with a warrant, then we have no alternative but to take those people into custody,” Douglas Griffith, president of the Houston Police Officers’ Union, said shortly after the change. He is among the critics of the city council’s ordinance.
Almost immediately, stories surfaced around the country of undocumented immigrants being pulled over for minor traffic infractions and then facing deportation after an officer entered their name in the database. Elsewhere, domestic abuse victims have ended up in deportation proceedings after calling police.
“Those outcomes are the consequence of policies that the Trump administration and Gov. Abbott, and the Legislature passed at different times,” said Nick Hudson, senior manager of policy and advocacy at the ACLU of Texas. “It’s just important to me that people understand how our state leaders and the federal government are working together in a way that is causing enormous harm.”
Cities try to thread a needle with policies
As a result, city leaders in Austin, Houston and beyond have tried crafting policies to instruct officers on what is permissible for them to do under law and assuage residents’ worries while avoiding a showdown with state leaders.
Houston’s ordinance, for example, nullified a Houston Police Department policy instructing officers who encounter a person with an immigration warrant to wait at least half an hour for ICE to pick up the immigrant.
The ordinance sought to ensure officers do not violate a person’s constitutional rights by holding them longer than “reasonably necessary” to complete the initial reason for stopping them. It passed after a string of news reports by the Houston Chronicle documented how Houston police collaborated with ICE, even as Whitmire initially insisted that was not the case — he later admitted police were working with ICE.
One report revealed officers had personally delivered two immigrants to ICE, which legal experts said could be a violation of a person’s constitutional rights because the ICE warrants are not grounds for arrest. Another detailed the case of a woman who called 911 to report domestic abuse, only to have Houston police call ICE on her.
The ordinance passed with the mayor’s backing. After receiving a letter from Gov. Greg Abbott’s office threatening to cut off the state funds and learning of Attorney General Ken Paxton’s investigation, Whitmire blamed the three council members who had introduced the proposal for the state backlash.
“We had a reasonable ICE policy,” Whitmire said. “But three council members that are running for office decided to make this a higher profile issue.”
At a Tuesday city council meeting, Alejandra Salinas, one of the three council sponsors, got into a fiery exchange with Whitmire and urged the mayor to stand by the ordinance and fight back in court.
“It would be a great mistake to do anything else,” Salinas said.
Other cities have tried different approaches. El Paso leaders passed a resolution opposing a proposed ICE detention center, while San Antonio officials are trying to offer residents transparency by releasing information about when local police help ICE.
Paxton’s office, which did not respond to requests for comment, is also reportedly investigating Austin over a new ordinance limiting police cooperation with ICE.
Austin leaders passed their own measure following a town hall held by three council members in February after police officers responding to a domestic disturbance called ICE on a woman and her daughter, who were swiftly deported to Honduras. The town hall saw angry residents demanding that they stand up against ICE.
Vanessa Fuentes, one of the council members, said that incident and the subsequent outrage led to the city council approving a policy that aims to ensure residents feel safe seeking help from police but also follows the 2017 law.
The policy requires officers to talk to a supervisor before turning an immigrant over to ICE and clarified that an ICE warrant alone was insufficient to detain or arrest someone. If a supervisor approves, an officer can wait for ICE to respond.
Austin police are “first and foremost … here to provide safety for our community,” Fuentes said in an interview before Paxton’s probe. “It really has been really challenging.”
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