Dallas
The “most important thing right now for us to keep everyone safe and keep the community believing in their police department, that it’s doing the very best to serve them every single day.”
Houston
How does one claim that HPD is not asking about immigration, when every thing seems to point to that they do.
There must be at least 30 people in Houston who have my name, so if someone who is here illegally is on that list and I call the police to report a crime, the police will ask for my identification. If I don’t show my Real ID, what else can I use? What would HPD ask for? If they show them a visa from another country and the name is similar to one of the list of almost a million people, do they call immigration? There are too many unknowns, and the mayor and the police chief are not talking, so they send them to the HPD union. When did the HPD union become the voice of the City of Houston?
“We are the Houston Police Department. We enforce state and city laws, not immigration, not ICE,” Whitmire said at a Nov. 12 City Council meeting.
The department has had to defend its calls to ICE, including one in April when it alerted ICE about a woman from El Salvador after she had dialed 911 to report domestic abuse.
The Houston Police Department said in a statement that it does not ask about immigration status but that officers are “required to contact the issuing agency when they encounter a person with a warrant. After verifying the warrant with ICE, the officer detains the individual and transfers custody to an ICE agent.”
Dallas v Houston
When Immigration and Customs Enforcement came calling on Dallas Police Chief Daniel Comeaux months ago to ask his officers to assist in supporting President Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration enforcement operations, the chief of police in the third-largest city in this very red state said no.
On the other hand, in Texas’ largest city, Houston Mayor John Whitmire, a Democrat, has been under fire from residents and officials since he was quoted in the Houston Chronicle acknowledging some cooperation with ICE. The police department there has no formal agreement with the agency, but calls from the city’s police force to ICE, mostly as result of traffic stops, have risen 1000% since President Donald Trump was re-elected, the Houston Chronicle reported based on public records.