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Emmanuel Gonzalez, a 15-year-old who has a serious intellectual disability, walked away from his mom’s fruit stand in Houston in October. His mother filed a missing person’s report.
When Houston police found Emmanuel, they didn’t reunite the boy with his mother. They called immigration authorities.
His mother pleaded with immigration officials for his release. Instead, the Office of Refugee Resettlement detained Emmanuel for 48 days.
Emmanuel’s treatment triggered a fight at city hall over who was responsible.
This was not an isolated incident, nor was it specific to Houston. That fight has only escalated in recent days — to finger-pointing, lawsuits from the state of Texas, and threats from the Houston Police Officers’ Union.
According to an analysis by the Texas Tribune, daily immigration-related arrests have risen roughly 30 percentage points in regions including Houston, and the Harris County Jail leads the country in ICE detainers (requests from immigration agents to hold a person for deportation).
Reporting from the Houston Chronicle found police calls to ICE have surged 1,000%. And, in an increasing number of cases, calls for help to Houston police have resulted in the caller or a family member winding up in federal detention. In one case, a woman from El Salvador called Houston police to report an abusive ex-husband — but instead, officers called ICE. (A similar case in Austin recently resulted in the deportation of a 5-year-old American citizen and her mother to Honduras.)
Now, like many other American cities in President Donald Trump’s second term — which has seen the largest immigration crackdown in our country’s history — Houston’s police force finds itself at a crossroads.
Whitmire, the city council, and Houston’s police union have spent months embroiled in a dramatic, chaotic, voices-raised battle over their participation in federal immigration enforcement.
“You’re playing politics with our officers,” said Doug Griffith, president of the Houston Police Officers’ Union, to the city council during yet another “ugly fight” at City Hall. As Chron.com first reported, Griffith argued that rank-and-file officers are left to deal with the consequences of the city council’s decisionmaking.
“Don’t tell me we don’t have bigger issues in this city,” said Griffith. “We can’t get our water cheap, we cannot get our heavy trash picked up… and now we’re worried about this — 74 traffic stops last year.”
Those 74 immigration-related traffic stops were the issue.
By a vote of 12-5 last Wednesday, Houston City Council changed a set of Houston Police Department rules governing how officers work with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — rules which had been among the friendliest in the state to Trump’s mass deportation regime.
In plain language, the ordinance ensures a police officer can only detain someone for as long as necessary to investigate state or local crimes. Under the new policy, officers cannot continue to detain someone solely on the basis of a federal administrative warrant, which, unlike warrants issued in criminal cases, are not reviewed and approved by a neutral decision-maker. Not only is this sound policy, the ordinance implements the requirements of the Fourth Amendment, protecting Houstonians constitutional freedoms.
In response, the Houston Police Officer’s Union and its president released an inflammatory statement claiming it “will not support any council member who supported” the ordinance — including Whitmire, whom the union previously endorsed in his mayoral run (Whitmire subsequently gifted police officers a 36% raise over five years).
Days later, Griffith claimed, “no endorsements have been retracted.”
Then, this week, Griffith returned to council on behalf of the union to provide a rant full of falsehoods, personal attacks on councilmembers, and arrogance.
The union — and Griffith’s response — demonstrates that council members must reconsider the value of the support of an association that in one breath demands the discretion to utilize untold time and resources to personally transport individuals to ICE, and in the next defends their suspension of thousands of sexual assault investigations for “lack of personnel.”
The mayor and 11 council members who supported the ordinance to protect Houstonians constitutional rights deserve applause. Particularly in light of threats from Gov. Greg Abbott that materialized last week in the form of a lawsuit by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
The lawsuit is seemingly political fodder for Paxton’s heated run-off election in the Republican Senate primary. But it does force the city’s hand to decide whether Houston will stand on its principles by defending the ordinance in court or be bullied into submission by Austin politicians that do not share Houstonians values.
As Councilmember Alejandra Salinas put it, “It’s no longer a question about whether the city should go to court.” She continued, “We’re already there. The mayor and city council must vigorously defend the law we voted for and that the city attorney deemed legal. I stand ready to work with my colleagues to defend our laws and protect Houstonians’ constitutional rights.”
In fact, the union’s initial decision to pull its endorsement from the mayor, and then issue a contradictory subsequent statement, should serve as a wakeup call to city officials that the union expects obedience above all else — or what the U.S. Constitution says.
In his remarks before city council this week, Griffith, on behalf of the union, seemingly threatened Council Member Carolyn Evans-Shabazz, telling her, “Don’t you ever let me catch you saying [you support police] again.”
Gasps and shouts erupted in the room.
Then, when asked about a controversial cartoon depicting several council members operating a lemonade stand in front of City Hall, posted to the union’s Facebook page,Griffith defended it saying, “some council member thought it was funny.” His performance before city council was the real joke, though, as it exposed the glaring lack of factual, legal, and public support behind the union and Mr. Griffith’s position.
This is not the first time the union has taken a position that harms Houstonians. When discussing the well-documented discriminatory impact low-level traffic enforcement has on Black and brown Houstonians this past fall, the union’s president, Griffith, stated that reform efforts would be better spent “on educating the public on how to act” during a traffic stop because “the road is not the place to argue over your ‘rights.’”
Griffith also explained his view that attempts to reduce racial disparities in traffic enforcement are trying to “solve a problem that don’t exist,” even though the city’s own data confirms that Black drivers are disproportionately more likely to be stopped, searched, and brutalized during traffic stops.
But according to Griffith, this data is “highly offensive” to police officers because “[e]very single incident that leads to [a police officer using] violence begins with a violator refusing to comply with lawful commands.”
Long time followers of the union’s work will recall similar rhetoric from 2020, when they opposed proposals for reform in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd, claiming advocates of such policies were “uneducated to the true facts of Houston police department and their interactions with the community.”
Similarly, in 2022, the union issued a report decrying misdemeanor bail reform in Harris County — reforms which independent monitors recently confirmed are protecting the public while saving taxpayers millions. But the union’s report “was riddled with inaccuracies and faulty assumptions,” as the Houston Chronicle reported.
While the union tells the city council to “pay more attention to the actual issues,’” it routinely stands in the way of fixing them by blocking evidence-based policies, all while celebrating a new contract that will cost the city nearly a billion dollars over five years.
The union claims to be “extremely disappointed” in council members who supported the policy and absurdly called it “extremely dangerous” for its officers. Given their persistent opposition to commonsense proposals and wild overreactions, it’s abundantly clear that the values of the police union are what’s “extreme” and that they do not align with the interest of the people of Houston.
Hopefully now that the union has shown its true colors, reasonable city council members can finally act freely to protect the rights and safety of Houstonians.
