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Texas Mayor Rolls Back ICE Cooperation After Blue Wave

"This is the right thing to do at the right time."

Houston Democrat Mayor John Whitmire is rolling back local police cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after a blue wave swept through Texas during Tuesday's election.

On Friday, Whitmire signed an order limiting local police officers' ability to contact ICE that would let some illegal immigrants walk free.

"This is the right thing to do at the right time," Whitmire said during a press conference announcing the change.

"No one has to worry about them doing a warrant, search, which includes ICE unless they're being charged with a new jailable offense, including dangerous crimes, violent offenders. It will improve our public safety, it will reduce the fear and anxiety of students, our workers, and I will take the responsibility of making this change even with the current administration still in office for two months," he said.

Under the new order, ICE will only be contacted when local officers make an arrest of an illegal immigrant for a jailable offense who also has an administrative immigration warrant, officials said. If one is pulled over and given a citation, local police will let them go, Houston Police Chief J. Noe Diaz Jr. said during Friday's announcement.

"The message is clear: ICE will only be contacted if someone commits a jailable offense," Diaz said. "This means our officers will only contact ICE if someone they arrest also has an administrative ICE warrant. For example, if our police officers pull someone over for a minor traffic infraction and they write a citation, that person receives a citation and goes about their day."

"HPD will no longer contact ICE if they have an administrative warrant and they are not arrested," the police chief said.

Whitmire said he hopes Houston's new order will serve as a "model for Texas cities" and said he's recently "been in contact with the new state leadership."

In April, the Houston City Council passed an ordinance barring officers from detaining people on administrative immigration warrants, then revised it two weeks later after the state threatened to pull more than $110 million in public safety grants. The restrictions had allowed officers to release people with administrative immigration warrants if they had no jailable offense.

The state requires that recipients of the public safety grants work with ICE. If they refuse to help federal immigration authorities, "they forfeit the money" and must "repay to the state every single dollar they have received," Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott told The Daily Wire in a previous interview.

With the help of Abbott's office, Whitmire revised the ordinance after voting for it. The revised ordinance said nothing in it would limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities required by state law, and HPD instructed officers to hold people for a reasonable amount of time for ICE to take custody.

During Friday's press conference, Whitmire said he "had to listen" to Abbott at the time because "our finances were at stake."

Texas Democrat Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa has also criticized immigration enforcement operations.

"As governor, I will never offer up Texas as a staging ground for operations that terrorize families and enrich his [Abbott's] donors," Hinojosa said during a Jan. 31 rally.

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