Houston Police Department officers have called federal immigration officers on people reporting accidents or asking for help at least 22 times, according to records obtained by the Houston Chronicle, a trend that troubles legal experts who argue that it could undermine trust in the police and discourage the public from reporting crimes.
As one example, last month, a woman flagged down an HPD officer to report a car crash, the Chronicle reported. That officer responded by reporting her to federal immigration authorities — though they ultimately never responded or detained her. In another instance, police called immigration officers on a woman who was stranded with her child at Hobby Airport.
Since the start of the year, leaders within the department have mandated the use of a new internal code, “Immigration Inquiry,” to catalog interactions with any of over 700,000 people recently added to a national database tracking outstanding warrants from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“I think from a public safety perspective, this makes little sense,” Travis Fife, a staff attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, told the Chronicle. “… This policy could deter hundreds of thousands of Houstonians who have questionable or no immigration status from doing the community work of keeping the neighborhood safe.”
The Chronicle’s reporting comes after Houston Mayor John Whitmire in January dismissed concerns that local police would cooperate with a huge expansion of federal deportations of immigrants under President Donald Trump — some of whom were detained erroneously.
“We do not deal with immigration,” Whitmire said at the time, as reported by the Chronicle. “We’re not the immigration department. We’re not ICE. We run the city of Houston, we deal with city issues.”
That was a separate assurance from those made by the Dallas Police Department in February. The DPD’s interim police chief told the public that the department “is not assisting any federal agency on somehow detaining people that are either documented or undocumented in the City of Dallas.”
Those claims prompted Attorney General Ken Paxton, who last week announced a U.S. Senate run, to open an investigation into the department to see if it was violating state laws forbidding “sanctuary” policies for immigrants.
One lawyer who reviewed the redacted public records obtained by the Chronicle said that they could leave police vulnerable to legal action for violating Fourth Amendment due process rights. In at least one case, officers called ICE after stopping a vehicle in connection with an aggravated robbery.
“They’re opening themselves up to a lawsuit for a violation of the Fourth Amendment,” said Jennefer Canales-Pelaez, Texas policy attorney and strategy with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. “A lot of the reason cited in the documents for the stop is a routine traffic stop. A person can only be detained during those for as long as there exists reasonable suspicion from the reason for the stop.”
