As he campaigned for Houston mayor three years ago, John Whitmire repeatedly leaned on his Austin connections after serving five decades in the Capitol, first as a state representative and then as a senator, to pitch himself as a peacemaker following years of GOP state leaders clashing with the city’s Democratic leaders.
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This week that collaborative spirit imploded into a controversy over the Houston Police Department’s role in immigration enforcement.
Days after the Houston City Council — with Whitmire’s support — ratified an ordinance to minimize Houston police cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Texas attorney general’s office launched an investigation into the city that could lead to an effort to remove local officials from office.
Then the governor’s office told the city it is on the brink of losing more $100 million in funding because the ordinance violates state grant agreements.
The political whirlwind encapsulates a tension simmering in city halls across the state’s left-leaning urban cores. From McAllen to Dallas, residents infuriated with President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown are demanding their city leaders take action to protect them and their neighbors from ICE.
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In Houston, Whitmire called a special meeting scheduled for Friday for the city council to reconsider the immigration order — which nullifies a police policy requiring officers to hold people for ICE — following the governor’s threat to cancel state public safety funding.
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When Trump returned to the White House last year and launched a nationwide mass deportation effort, one of the ways his administration sought to use local police to help find and apprehend undocumented immigrants was by adding hundreds of thousands of federal immigration warrants — which are typically civil offenses — to a crime database routinely used by police across the nation.
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As a result, city leaders in Austin, Houston and beyond have tried crafting policies to instruct officers on what is permissible for them to do under law and assuage residents’ worries while avoiding a showdown with state leaders.
Houston’s ordinance, for example, nullified a Houston Police Department policy instructing officers who encounter a person with an immigration warrant to wait at least half an hour for ICE to pick up the immigrant.
The ordinance sought to ensure officers do not violate a person’s constitutional rights by holding them longer than “reasonably necessary” to complete the initial reason for stopping them. It passed after a string of news reports by the Houston Chronicle documented how Houston police collaborated with ICE, even as Whitmire initially insisted that was not the case — he later admitted police were working with ICE.
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The ordinance passed with the mayor’s backing. After receiving a letter from Gov. Greg Abbott’s office threatening to cut off the state funds and learning of Attorney General Ken Paxton’s investigation, Whitmire blamed the three council members who had introduced the proposal for the state backlash.
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The post Texas Cities Try to Address Citizen Anger Over Immigration Crackdown Without Riling State Leaders appeared first on American Renaissance.
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