Texas vowed to cooperate with ICE, but its big-city police departments face a difficult choice

SAN ANTONIO — When Immigration and Customs Enforcement came calling on Dallas Police Chief Daniel Comeaux months ago to ask his officers to assist in supporting President Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration enforcement operations, the chief of police in the third-largest city in this very red state said no.

On the other hand, in Texas’ largest city, Houston Mayor John Whitmire, a Democrat, has been under fire from residents and officials since he was quoted in the Houston Chronicle acknowledging some cooperation with ICE. The police department there has no formal agreement with the agency, but calls from the city’s police force to ICE, mostly as result of traffic stops, have risen 1000% since President Donald Trump was re-elected, the Houston Chronicle reported based on public records.

The approaches in Dallas and Houston show the quandary some police departments face as they weigh their cities’ public safety priorities against the Trump administration’s pressures to multiply its enforcement forces. Texas’ largest cities, where the majority of its Black and Hispanic populations are concentrated, face a tough choice: partner with ICE and risk blowback from their own communities or take a pass and risk seeing the administration send ICE, Border Patrol or National Guard troops to their cities. Chicago, Los Angeles and Charlotte, North Carolina, chose the latter option, only to see federal immigration enforcement arrive on their streets.

Texas Republican lawmakers and the governor have generally sided with helping the Trump administration by passing laws that require cooperation. Sheriffs’ offices in Texas counties with populations of more than 100,000 are required by law to sign an agreement with ICE by December 2026. Texas’ Department of Public Safety, which includes highway troopers, has also signed an agreement with ICE.

Sheriffs’ offices and other law enforcement departments around the country, including in cities like Las Vegas and Miami, are signing up with unprecedented speed to a decades-old program to partner with ICE, according to the Migration Policy Institute, an immigration think tank that has surveyed departments about the partnerships over the years.

A spokesperson frofor m the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement: “ICE is not only supercharging our hiring, we are also multiplying partnerships with state and local law enforcement to remove the worst of the worst including murderers, gang members, rapists, terrorists, and pedophiles from our country. ... We encourage all state and local law enforcement agencies to become a 287(g) partner and join us in the fight to make America safe again.”

Nonetheless, none of the police departments of the top 10 U.S. cities, which include Houston, Dallas and San Antonio, have signed on as partners with ICE, according to a list the agency posts on its website.

In many cases, not cooperating comes with turning down money that is being offered to local and state law enforcement agencies as an incentive, said Muzaffar Chishti, who directs the New York office of the Migration Policy Institute.

“What has added a whole new wrinkle to this is money, which has placed more and more pressure on ICE officers and these 287(g) officers to arrest and detain more people,” he said. The 287(g) program, whose use has ebbed and flowed under different administrations, gives immigration enforcement powers to state and local law enforcement agencies.

DHS said its program includes reimbursements for each 287(g)-trained officer’s annual salary and benefits, as well as a percentage of their overtime. Local law enforcement agencies would also be eligible for quarterly monetary performance awards.

Comeaux said ICE had offered Dallas up to $25 million in reimbursement for partnering with it.

But he decided, and a joint City Council committee affirmed in a Nov. 6 meeting, that pulling police officers from their current duties and putting them on immigration enforcement arrests would be detrimental to what so far is a trend of lower homicide rates, lower violent crime, fewer traffic deaths and improved police response times, according to Comeaux. The committee voted against partnering.

“It will not make Dallas any safer, because we are aggressively going after those who are committing violent crimes already,” Comeaux said at the time, “so this program would not help us in any kind of way.”

In a statement, Comeaux repeated that he turned down an offer of $25 million from ICE because it would not have covered overtime costs and officers would be reassigned under federal oversight, which could negatively affect response times and erode public trust.

Although the Dallas Police Department does not partner with ICE, the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office does notify it about immigrants in its custody who may have immigration violations. An ICE field office in Dallas that serves North Texas and Oklahoma was the site of a shooting in September, in which two people who were detained were killed and a third was wounded.

Things have been less clear in Houston, where Whitmire, the mayor, has come under fire locally following his statement about cooperating with ICE. In March, Houston officers were directed to contact immigration authorities when they encountered anyone with a deportation order ICE listed in a national database. Whitmire sought to clarify his comments amid uproar in the city, which has a high immigrant population.

“We are the Houston Police Department. We enforce state and city laws, not immigration, not ICE,” Whitmire said at a Nov. 12 City Council meeting.

The department has had to defend its calls to ICE, including one in April when it alerted ICE about a woman from El Salvador after she had dialed 911 to report domestic abuse.

The Houston Police Department said in a statement that it does not ask about immigration status but that officers are “required to contact the issuing agency when they encounter a person with a warrant. After verifying the warrant with ICE, the officer detains the individual and transfers custody to an ICE agent.”

Whitmire’s office said in a statement that while immigration matters fall under federal jurisdiction, “anyone who breaks the law in the City of Houston will be held accountable. When police encounter an individual with an outstanding warrant from another law enforcement agency, they are required to notify that agency.”

ICE has added hundreds of thousands of administrative warrants — which are for civil violations and are not signed by judges — to the National Crime Information Center database, which police officers use to check for warrants when they pull someone over for a traffic stop.

The president of the Houston Police Officers’ Union, Douglas Griffith, told NPR that the warrants are showing up in the database and that “if they pop up with a warrant, then we have no alternative but to take those people into custody.”

But ICE officials who spoke at the Dallas City Council committee meeting this month said assisting the agency with immigration enforcement would be a benefit.

“It’s good for the city, because you definitely have some individuals that fall through the cracks,” an ICE official who identified himself only as an assistant Dallas field office director named Francis said at the meeting. For example, he said, a person released on traffic citations could have been previously deported, re-entered the country illegally and possibly committed offenses.

He also pointed to the arrest by a police officer with 287(g) training in Oklahoma of a foreign-born person who had been flagged by Interpol.

But Comeaux, a former special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration Houston office, told council members he rejected joining the 287(g) program because the “most important thing right now for us to keep everyone safe and keep the community believing in their police department, that it’s doing the very best to serve them every single day.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com