Houston police directed to call ICE on undocumented immigrants with deportation orders

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Houston police are being instructed to call federal immigration authorities if they come across an individual who has deportation orders listed in the national crime database.

The new guidance to law enforcement in Texas’ largest city comes after the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials added 700,000 individuals with deportation orders to the National Crime Information Center database, which is used widely by local law enforcement across the country to track warrants, missing persons, stolen property and other criminal records.

The Houston Chronicle first reported on the guidance Friday, citing an email from Executive Chief Thomas Hardin. According to the Chronicle, the email said officers must call federal authorities when they discover a hit in the federal system. Hardin told officers to consult with federal authorities on how to handle the situation, including remaining at the scene for ICE to arrive.

"If that is not feasible or offered, our officers will select whatever option does not involve transporting the individual," Hardin wrote in the email, according to the Chronicle.

The updated guidance comes after Houston police recently called ICE on an undocumented immigrant motorist after stopping him for a cracked windshield, bringing renewed attention to local law enforcement’s involvement in immigration enforcement.

There are more than 1.4 million people with active deportation orders across the country.

ICE’s inclusion of individuals with deportation orders to the crime database broadens the ability for local law enforcement to identify undocumented immigrants. Previously, local law enforcement across the country did not have access to such administrative warrants.

“We’ve never seen ICE detainers before. They were just never in our system,” Doug Griffith, spokesperson for the Houston Police Officers’ Union, told The Houston Landing on Friday. “Now the feds have put that into the system. So if we stop somebody and they show an ICE detainer, we have to contact ICE or whatever agency they have the warrant out of.”

Erika Ramirez, a spokesperson for the Houston Police Department, told the Texas Tribune that it is Houston Police protocol to contact any agency whenever an active warrant comes back from the NCIC database.

“A warrant is a warrant,” Ramirez said. “It's always been our protocol to contact that agency that issued the warrant to determine how they wanted to handle it.”

Ramirez added that Houston police do not ask individuals about their immigration status. She declined to share the internal email with the Tribune.

Houston police department protocol has stated since 2020 that officers “shall contact ICE if a background check through NCIC/TCIC returns a possible hit from ICE regarding a wanted or detained person.”

Cesar Espinosa, executive director of FIEL Houston, an immigrant rights organization in the city, said police need to clarify the extent they’ll cooperate with immigration enforcement officers.

“It’s important that before cities put out policies that they really think about the impact,” he told the Tribune. “ If trust is chipped away then, at the end of the day, we are all more vulnerable.”

Nearly 550,000 undocumented immigrants live in the Houston area, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

Not all cities said they would call ICE if a deportation order appears in NCIC.

In Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh officials said in January that they will not arrest or detain individuals based on administrative warrants.

Espinosa and other immigrant advocates in the city criticized Houston police on Friday after officers stopped Jose Armando Lainez Argueta, an undocumented immigrant, for a cracked windshield on his car earlier this month. The officers called ICE officers who took Lainez into custody. He’s now being held at Montgomery Processing Center in Conroe.

“Maybe this is status quo now,” Espinosa told the Tribune. [That] they’ll question people about anything, which could lead us down a very dark road for the Houston community.”

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