Houston police worked with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on at least 103 occasions since April, according to the first report required by the Houston City Council to measure cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities.
The quarterly immigration report, released Friday, shows that most police encounters with people who had immigration warrants or “consultations” from ICE ended with officers releasing them at the scene: 59 people, or 57%, of the encounters ended that way after immigrants were detained for an average of 39 minutes.
Only 19 people, or 18%, were transferred to ICE custody after encounters with Houston police, the report said. Another 14 people faced new charges and two were transported to hospitals from accident scenes.
Nearly all of the people — 91 of 103 — were Hispanic, and six of 10 were men.
Nearly half of the interactions between HPD and ICE began with traffic stops by police, while another 17 were at accident scenes. The rest happened after “calls for service” or during investigations or arrests.
“HPD’s average rate of monthly calls to ICE doubled, with more than 100 calls in three months, some detentions lasting nearly two hours, and 19 Houstonians turned over to ICE custody,” said council member Alejandra Salinas, who helped pass the ordinance and said she compared numbers in the report to a previous Houston Chronicle investigation. “I have since asked HPD Chief Diaz to address Council, explain the increase in calls and detention times, and identify any changes HPD may make in response.
“HPD should be focused on solving crime, not doing the job of ICE,” Salinas added. “Even one Houstonian transferred to ICE custody based on (an immigration) warrant is too many.”
HPD declined to comment on the report.
Local police have been increasingly used as a force multiplier during the Trump administration’s mass deportations push. One of the main ways the federal government has tried to leverage local police is by adding immigration warrants for 700,000 individuals to the National Crime Information Center database, a widely used tool that police use to learn a person’s criminal history, check for arrest warrants and find missing persons among other things.
All of the people included in the HPD report appeared in the NCIC database.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said partnerships with law enforcement “are critical to having the resources we need to arrest criminal illegal aliens across the country. We have had tremendous success when local law enforcement work with us, including 40,000 arrests in Florida and a recent two-week operation in West Virginia that resulted in the arrest of over 650 illegal aliens.”
In March, Houston Police Chief Noe Diaz and Mayor John Whitmire announced a rule ordering local law enforcement to wait 30 minutes for federal agents to arrive at the scene if they encounter people with immigration warrants in the course of their work. A month later, the City Council approved the new ordinance to stop that practice and ordered the quarterly reports on its coordination with ICE.
The city scaled back its ordinance after Gov. Abbott threatened to withdraw $110 million in public safety grants from the city and Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office launched an investigation, alleging the ordinance violated Senate Bill 4, which bans cities from adopting policies that “materially limit” immigration enforcement.
The report comes more than a week after ICE officers shot and killed 52-year-old Houstonian Lorenzo Salgado Araujo during an operation in Magnolia Park, a predominantly Latino working class neighborhood on the city’s east side. HPD wasn’t involved in that operation, city leaders said.
Salgado Araujo was born in Mexico and had started the process to legalize his status, according to his family. He was shot by an ICE officer on July 7 after picking up fellow workers in his van on their way to a construction job.
ICE said an officer fired after Salgado Araujo rammed one of their vehicles and tried to run over the agent. The other three men in the van dispute that account.
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