Houston stops police calling ICE over traffic stops, days after Democrats win Texas: “Elections matter”

For most of this year, a broken tail-light in Houston could end with a call to federal immigration agents. From this week, it will not.

Mayor John Whitmire signed an executive order on Friday, 6 November, telling Houston Police Department officers to contact Immigration and Customs Enforcement only when a person is arrested for a jailable offence and is also the subject of an administrative immigration warrant. Routine encounters that end without an arrest, such as a traffic stop that ends in a citation, will no longer be reported to ICE, even if a warrant shows up during the check.

“I do this to begin a healing process,” Whitmire said, describing the aim as reducing fear and anxiety in Houston’s immigrant communities. Then he named the reason it was happening now: “I also do this knowing that elections matter.”

What changed on Tuesday?

Three days before the order, Texas voters did something they had not done in more than three decades. Democrat Gina Hinojosa defeated Republican Governor Greg Abbott, becoming the first Democrat elected governor of Texas since Ann Richards in 1990 and the first Latina to win the office. Abbott has conceded.

Democrats also won other statewide offices, including attorney general, as part of the swing that handed the party control of both houses of the US Congress.

Whitmire said he had already spoken with the newly elected statewide officials and expected a different approach to immigration enforcement once they take office in January.

Why didn’t Houston do this before?

It tried. In April, Houston City Council approved an ordinance limiting when officers could contact ICE. State leaders responded by threatening to withhold more than US$110 million in public safety funding from the city, and Whitmire, a former state senator, pushed the council to amend the ordinance to avoid the loss.

He defended that retreat on Friday. “We cannot run the city government without state and federal grants, bottom line,” he said. He acknowledged the new order still carries political risk, and said he was prepared to accept it because he believed it was the right thing to do.

How will it work on the street?

Police Chief J. Noe Diaz said the instructions had gone out to every officer and would be read at roll call for five days. His summary was blunt: ICE will be contacted only for a jailable offence.

The department does not take part in a 287(g) agreement, the federal program that deputises local officers to carry out immigration enforcement. The order does not stop ICE agents operating in Houston on their own, and once a person is in the county jail, decisions about whether they are handed to ICE rest with Harris County.

The department’s latest quarterly report showed 88 immigration-related contacts with ICE between July and September. Seventeen led to a person being transferred to ICE, and 58 people were released at the scene.

Who welcomed it, and who did not?

Immigrant advocates called it overdue. Cesar Espinosa, executive director of the Houston group FIEL, said the policy should have taken effect when the council first approved it in April. Houston Controller Chris Hollins called the order a promising first step.

ICE had not publicly responded to the order. Whitmire said he hoped Houston’s approach would become a model for other Texas cities, while arguing that lasting change to immigration enforcement has to come from Washington.

Why does it matter beyond Houston?

Texas has been central to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, and its state leaders have used funding threats, as they did with Houston in April, to keep cities working with federal agents. A Democratic governor changes that equation, and Houston is the first big Texas city to test how far it can now go.

For immigrant families in a city of more than two million people, the difference is practical: a routine traffic stop is once again a traffic stop.

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