I am shocked that this could happen in the Land of the Free.
No, I am not. It actually has been happening for a long time in this great country of ours. It is just that those who got stopped were always blamed for somehow drawing the attention of the police. Racism never played a part, of course, not in this country.
Back in 2023, I wrote the following:
Expect that the DPS officers that John Whitmire would bring to Houston will soon be patrolling and stopping Mexican looking people to question their citizenship if he is elected Mayor. He has to give red meat to his Republicans supporters to keep them happy.
It already happens at the border, where many residents feel that they are living in a police state. I vote that they place the DPS troopers over thereon the northside where Armando Walle and Sylvia Garcia are elected officials. Maybe Walle will be stopped while transporting one of his undocumented relatives that he alluded to?
“It seemed just about everyone I met had a DPS story to tell. “The question I get from everyone around town is ‘when do they leave?’” confided a police officer in Starr County, who was not authorized to speak to the media. …
Garrett, whose current research focuses on border security, argues that these large-scale law enforcement operations spread fear among locals by flooding their communities with cops. “Harassment is normalized, even though it wouldn’t be accepted anywhere else, but this is the experience here, where we basically have a police state,” Garrett said. For many residents the spectacle has become a familiar inconvenience, something to endure.
Well, Whitmire has not brought in DPS, didn’t have to, HPD and County officers are doing so silently as to not alarm the Latinos as to what is happening here in Houston, Texas.
March 2025: Harris County recorded more immigrants ordered removed than any other county in the U.S.
Once again, Harris County has become the deportation capital of the United States, yet very few people are aware of it. We were number one when Adrian Garcia was sheriff. Now, his buddy Gonzalez is the Sheriff, and we are back to number one. Latinos seem to be great at deportations of people who look like them.
A ruling Monday by the U.S. Supreme Court that temporarily allows immigration agents to detain people based on their appearance, where they work and how well they speak English means Latinos everywhere should be on alert, advocacy groups said.
“This decision is definitely an affirmation that these federal agents can continue to operate with a certain level of impunity and can basically stop and detain folks who either speak Spanish, work in certain industries, or just look like they’re Latino in other parts of the country as well,” said Jeannette Zanipatin, the director of policy and advocacy for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, in an interview with the Houston Chronicle. “This is the Supreme Court actually saying it out loud.”
I often criticize Garcia for his deportations, but I am not the only one to notice it.
Many local governments and law enforcement agencies across the country stopped complying with the request to hold people for ICE to pick up and deport them. Adrian Garcia, on the other hand, has continued to support these programs, including an appearance on Democracy Now! in 2025 to defend the programs.
This fall President Obama announced that he was going to take executive action on immigration, which included an end the Secure Communities Program, which would be replaced by a “New Priority Enforcement Program” which works in a similar way, but should only target those convicted of violent and serious crimes. Adrian Garcia appeared on the NPR Radio program Hear and Now a week after President Obama’s announcement and said that this new program means less people will be deported and that that is a good thing.
While its great that he sees this program as a good thing, it would have been nice for him to be able to notice this earlier and push for the changes publicly while his office was facilitating the deportations of thousands of residents of Harris County for non-violent crimes. Adrian Garcia was either being dishonest in championing a program that he knew was deporting people who should not be deported, or he is being dishonest now that he is happy this new program should deport less people. Either way, we should be able to hope for more from someone who is proud of his heritage as a child of immigrants, and has political ambitions for higher office.
