We have a problem in Houston when ICE agents are more honest than some Houston police officers.
I have not been a fan of the Houston Chronicle, but in these times of crisis for the Hispanic community, it is taking a stand for what is proper and decent.
The following quotes are all from the same article; they are not behind a paywall. Here is the Chronicle’s article.
The Lie, or should we be nice and say mis-speak?
Diaz said his detectives spent four hours working with Emmanuel, fingerprinting him and giving him care.
“After exhausting all options,” he said, the department contacted Child Protective Services. He claimed it was CPS that referred Emmanuel’s case to federal custody. Diaz didn’t confirm or deny HPD’s involvement with ICE. He was careful to not even mention the agency.
But in an emailed statement, ICE told us HPD did indeed contact the agency.
According to ICE, HPD contacted them on Oct. 5 about a minor who claimed to be homeless and from another country. While the minor was never in ICE custody, “ICE worked with HPD to see if they could identify the minor or any of the minor’s family members living in the U.S. When no family could be identified, ICE helped HPD place the minor with the federal Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement.”
Diaz said that because of the government shutdown, HPD officers drove Emmanuel to the children’s detention center. In other words, they didn’t just call the feds. They personally handed him off.
The chief even went so far as to claim it was HPD who had the heart to finally give Maria answers.
“We, the Houston Police Department, decided ‘no, Mom’s got to know where the young man is'” because “she’s concerned,” Diaz told City Council.
The picture he artfully painted sure made the department look good. It also painted Maria as a negligent mom – one who can’t be trusted.
The opposite is true.
The attempted Cover-up
The chief claimed Maria had provided an outdated photo showing a child who looked more like 10. Our review of the mom’s phone shows the photo was taken this year.
Diaz also pushed back on the initial narrative that described the teen as autistic and nonverbal, pointing out that the teen could communicate with officers. That, apparently, had been enough for officers to determine the teen was not autistic.
It’s true that Emmanuel hasn’t been officially diagnosed as autistic. But a Houston ISD file clearly shows that he qualified for special education due to his intellectual disability, a speech impediment and partial deafness. According to one evaluation, the teen struggled to advocate for his needs.
There, at the bottom of a page signed by his deaf education teacher, audiologist and special ed teacher, is Emmanuel’s own signature, misspelled and signed in shaky, wandering letters: “Emmanel.”
I don’t know whether the Chief is being truthful about the officers making those decisions, or whether he artfully created that scenario to make his department not look as inept as the Houston Chronicle portrays it with words.
I have an autistic child who was diagnosed by Texas Children’s Hospital when he was about 4 years old. He is now in his thirties, and his signature is written the same way that Emmanuel writes his name. Notice that Emmanuel does not spell his name correctly; he left out the “U.” I should know, as my name is Manuel, which is a variation of Emmanuel, which means “God be with us.”
The Leader or the three monkeys
“Instead of looking for the missing persons report, instead of trying to find his mom – because Emmanuel is not an unaccompanied youth, his mom is right here – your office, your police department, Mayor Whitmire, decided to call ICE,” Cesar Espinosa, the head of immigrant rights group FIEL, alleged before City Council a couple of weeks ago.
The mayor neither confirmed or denied the claim outright, but it was easy to believe.
Mayor, you can stick your head in the ground as the New York Times painted you, or you can get that head out of the ground and at least try to grow into the job you ran for and won.
When half a million people in Houston are not documented and many documented living in mixed households where one finds people both legally here and not legally here, the Mayor and HPD are hurting themselves, because many, if not the vast majority of those people, will not report crimes nor offer to come forward if they witness a crime.
All those years of many HPD officers working to get the immigrant community to trust them are going down the drain. How are those murders that occurred in the Gulfton area going?
HPD probably includes the vast majority of hard-working, decent people who went into police work because they want to serve and protect. I wrote probably because I don’t know all of the officers, but I do know quite a few of them, and they are as I describe them. But, as the Houston Chronicle pointed out, it is a tiny number of police officers who are reporting undocumented people to ICE.