The lack of clarity from Houston Mayor John Whitmire regarding the Houston Police Department’s collaboration with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has not gone unnoticed since last year. Amid questions and protests for months, it had finally been achieved that records were published and that discussion occurred about how local police officers react when stopping people without immigration documents. Even several regulations were put in place to be followed, such as the much-mentioned thirty-minute wait.
That rule was that if a police officer carried out a traffic stop and the person had an administrative order from immigration authorities, they would detain the person for a maximum of thirty minutes to give ICE time to arrive to detain them.
That was, at least, the way the mayor’s office acknowledged the way Houston police officers work with the federal government.
Up to that point, it seemed that everything had been settled. This announcement did not manage to quell people’s fear of encounters with the police; anxiety remained on the streets, but people went on with their daily lives, scared as they have been since the start of the mass raids, but there is nothing more to do than to carry on.
A few weeks ago, three members of the Houston City Council introduced a proposal to become local law and to restrict HPD cooperation with ICE in a more formal way, although it should be noted that it did not prohibit it, but laid out different parameters.
Definitely, the hope of the immigrant community living in Houston returned, because that proposal would provide a way to move through the streets with a bit more peace of mind.
On the day of the vote, it was approved, becoming a new city ordinance, and the celebration among community leaders and the people was notable. However, the joy lasted very little, and that ray of hope faded almost immediately when Texas Governor Greg Abbott threatened to withdraw state funds from the city, money that would be used for public safety.
Immediately, Whitmire changed his stance and began seeking how to overturn that ordinance, dragging along the people’s trust and generating chaos and fear once again.
Under the governor’s pressure, Whitmire held an extraordinary meeting to reverse the ordinance despite the opposition of thousands in the city. In the end, he managed to present a modified version of that ordinance and won a vote in favor. This was so that the governor would provide the promised money at the time they had signed an agreement last year in which they had committed to cooperating with ICE.
According to the councilors who voted against it, the new version of the ordinance leaves many loose ends, one of them being that it allows police to detain a person for as long as they deem appropriate for ICE to arrive; that is, only people with orders, but that does not guarantee that any undocumented person will not be reported.
So it will no longer be thirty minutes; now it could be longer, because this ordinance allows it. That is why, as the saying goes, “the cure was worse than the disease.”
What do you think?
