Recently, John Whitmire came out and wanted to convince the community that Houston is not working with ICE. If the most liberal city in Texas, why would anyone think that Houston under John Whitmire is not working with ICE to a much greater degree?
When Austin police officers encountered a Honduran mother and her 5-year-old U.S. citizen daughter during a predawn disturbance call in Southwest Austin on Monday, they were not legally required to call immigration authorities. Yet within hours, federal agents had taken the pair into custody.
The arrest has exposed a murky and largely unexamined area of Austin police practice: when and why officers communicate with federal immigration authorities after encountering administrative immigration warrants. Despite repeated requests, Austin police have not explained why officers ran a background check, what prompted communication with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or whether officers were required – or merely chose – to act.
News of the mother and daughter’s detention was first reported by Univision on Wednesday, which shared the family’s search for the pair’s location. In its initial explanation of the mother’s arrest later that day, Austin police said only that it responded to a disturbance call in the Oak Hill neighborhood about 4:30 a.m. Monday. Police said an officer contacted ICE after running a background check and learning the woman had an ICE detainer request.
The following day, however, Austin police changed their explanation, saying the officer had communicated with ICE after learning the federal agency had previously placed an administrative warrant on the woman. The distinction is significant, legal experts told the American-Statesman, and raises questions about whether Austin police actively collaborated with ICE.
“Those are two different things,” Texas A&M immigration law professor Huyen Pham told the Statesman regarding detainers and administrative warrants. Acting on the latter, she said, represents “preemptive” collaboration with ICE.
ICE issues a detainer after another law enforcement agency has taken an individual into custody and booked them in jail. A detainer instructs the jail to hold the individual when they are otherwise eligible for release so ICE can assume custody. Texas law requires local law enforcement agencies to comply with ICE detainer requests.
An administrative warrant, by contrast, is issued internally by ICE and allows its agents to arrest someone for an immigration violation, such as overstaying a visa or failing to obey a deportation order. These are the warrants ICE most commonly uses to make an arrest, Pham said.
Although administrative warrants are sometimes confused with criminal warrants, they do not carry the same legal authority. Local police are not legally required to detain or transfer someone based solely on the existence of an administrative warrant, legal experts including Pham and University of Texas immigration law professor Elissa Steglich told the State
