If they are working the streets, it’s hard to find them, unless you happen to run into an accident, and then you could see six or more patrol cars there, and the officers standing around even after the ambulance has left. With community policing, I would on occasion see patrol cars in the neighborhood, but not one in about a year. Maybe I just missed them, but I have not seen a single patrol car in the neighborhood.
In my neighborhood, there are probably numerous mixed citizen households, and I know that many of them would not call the police to report a crime, as they don’t want to put family or friends at risk of deportation. Chief Diaz can claim that they are not working with ICE, but the community knows better. We usually have a national night, not this year, when many residents fear their presence more than they fear any would-be criminal.
HPD will likely claim that crime is down because many people have stopped reporting it.
Ahead of President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, Whitmire assured residents that immigration enforcement wasn’t the Houston Police Department’s job. But since then, the reality has been much more complicated.
Houston officers have authored a rapidly growing number of reports this year documenting their interactions with one of 700,000 names with administrative ICE warrants — generally for those with an outstanding order for deportation — recently added to a national database. The reports include varying levels of detail, with some even lacking a narrative entirely, and don’t provide a comprehensive picture of immigration enforcement under the second President Donald Trump administration.
Reports of a woman having Houston Police call ICE on her after reporting a sexual assault and another while reporting a crash, are among those that have experts saying the reports show a growing sense of cooperation between local police and federal immigration authorities.
Diaz said in a news conference that immigrants who feared reporting crimes to police were doing so based on a “false narrative,” but moments later said police have been instructed to call ICE for those with an outstanding immigration warrant.
Harris County is one of the top counties helping ICE deport people here illegally. Even the ones for whom the only crime was coming here without authorization.
The mainstream media is cooperating with Trump and Whitmire and mainly keeping the deportations silent so as not to alarm the people who are not here legally. Word of mouth is the preferred way of communication among that community, and if one person is stopped and disappears, it does not take long for people to start telling others. They have phones, and they don’t need a phone carrier to use them. Just like many other people in the world, they use WhatsApp. There are many places with free internet.
