Prompted by the midterm election results, Houston Mayor John Whitmire said Friday he’s directing the Houston Police Department to reduce contact with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers.
Whitmire issued a new executive order directing HPD officers to contact ICE officers only when a person with an administrative ICE warrant is charged with a jailable offense, Whitmire said.
“Department personnel shall contact ICE regarding a person only if that person is already going to jail on new charges or other warrants and has a positive National Crime Information Center (NCIC) hit for an ICE administrative warrant,” Whitmire said in the order.
“The fact that a person is, or is suspected to be, subject to immigration enforcement shall not, by itself, be a basis to contact ICE, to prolong any detention, or to take any person into or hold any person in custody,” the order stated. “If a person is not otherwise going to jail on new charges or other warrants, Department personnel shall not contact ICE regarding that person.”
HPD’s interactions with ICE posed a political conundrum to Whitmire over the past year.
In April, he joined a group of Houston City Council members in an effort to curtail the department's coordination with federal immigration agents — by giving officers discretion over whether or not to contact ICE about civil immigration warrants, and prohibiting them from detaining people for those warrants.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott intervened, threatening to revoke more than $110 million in public safety funding. Whitmire and the city council capitulated, reversing the measure and requiring officers to detain immigrants for a "reasonable" amount of time while waiting for ICE agents to respond to warrants.
Before the city council meeting in which officials walked back the ordinance, Whitmire's staff passed out a memo to city council members detailing more than $260 million in direct appropriations to Houston from the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature in 2025. Whitmire said a battle with the state would cost the city funding in the future.
The original ordinance required HPD to provide regular reports on those interactions, and that measure survived. According to the department's first two reports, officers contacted ICE nearly 200 times from April through September, including at least 36 instances in which HPD officers handed people directly to ICE.
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According to records obtained by Houston Public Media, some of those incidents came after people called emergency services for help — including for a suicide attempt and domestic violence.
Abbott nor the Texas Attorney General’s Office immediately responded to a request to comment regarding Whitmire’s announcement.
This is a developing story.
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