If you want to see what our Houston Police Officers union thinks of undocumented persons here in Houston, you don’t have to look any further than a letter that they put out today after the City Council voted to stop the waste of police officers’ time waiting for ICE to maybe show up. Or the damage they have done to any type of relations that they had with the immigrant community.
“Illegals” wonder how they determine someone is here illegally? When I first came to Houston, the police department was about 95% White. It has gotten better, but too many officers, it seems, still have the same mentality as those police officers who threw Joe Campos Torres into a bayou and told him, ” Let us see if the wetback can swim.
a total of six officers in three patrol cars carried Torres to a rundown warehouse area just across Buffalo Bayou from the Harris County Courthouse complex. They drove down an embankment to the south bank of the bayou, below street level and out of sight.
There, each one of the officers except one rookie officer took turns striking Torres while he was handcuffed. One of the officers, Terry [W.] Denson, remarked that he had always wanted to watch a prisoner swim the bayou. The group then took Torres to the city jail where the duty sergeant told them to take their prisoner to Ben Taub General Hospital for treatment prior to his official booking.
According to the HPOU’s account, Officer Stephen Orlando contemplated releasing Joe instead of taking him to the hospital where he would likely have to spend “several hours and then only being able to charge the prisoner with being drunk and disorderly.” Instead of taking him to the hospital to treat his wounds, he was taken by the six officers to a site where he was made to stand “perched on a location about twenty feet from the oft-polluted waters of Buffalo Bayou.” Then Denson–who had mentioned earlier that “he had always wanted to watch a prisoner swim the bayou,” -shoved him over the edge. He is quoted here, and in many–if not all–of the accounts, as saying: “Let’s see if the wetback can swim.” Reports from the time period dispute whether Joe was handcuffed or not, at the moment he was pushed into the bayou.
Let me make something clear: the warrants the union mentions are not judicial warrants; the people listed there may or may not have committed a crime, other than possibly being here illegally. Maybe the union forgot some incidents in which a call for help resulted in the caller being handed over to ICE.
She called 911 to report domestic abuse. Then Houston police called ICE on her.
Houston police called federal immigration agents on a woman who dialed 911 to report domestic abuse by her ex-husband in April, newly released records show.
The woman, an immigrant from El Salvador who has lived in Houston for seven years, had a removal order stemming from the denial of her asylum claim. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents declined to pick her up because they said there was no one to take custody of her children, according to a copy of the police report obtained by the Houston Chronicle through a public records request.
I want to make something clear: the HPD union or the police officer is not representative of the vast majority of police officers; they don’t share the same mentality as the leadership of the police union. That is why there are Chicano and Black Officer organizations within HPD.
So, if one is an undocumented immigrant, do they feel lucky today and call the police if they witness a crime?
Below is the full letter issued by the Houston Police Union. Notice the threat to Council Members who supported the measure.
