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Houston to Stop Alerting ICE on Traffic StopsWorld
Houston’s mayor has signed an executive order telling police to stop contacting immigration agents over nonviolent offences, days after Democrats swept statewide races in Texas.
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The mayor of Houston, Texas, has ordered the city’s police department to sharply limit its cooperation with federal immigration agents, days after Democrats swept midterm elections in the state.
Mayor John Whitmire signed an executive order on Friday directing Houston police to contact US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) only when a person is already going to jail on new charges or other warrants and has a positive hit for an ICE administrative warrant in the National Crime Information Center database.
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Under the new policy, officers conducting routine traffic stops or detaining someone for a nonviolent offence will no longer alert ICE. People given a citation for a minor offence will be allowed to go on their way, even if an immigration-related warrant appears in the system. The order states that suspected immigration enforcement alone shall not be a basis to contact ICE, prolong a detention or hold a person in custody.
“It’s to reduce the fear and anxiety, not just in some of our communities but across Houston,” Whitmire said at a press conference announcing the change. “As I’ve said many times, elections matter.”
The move follows a Democratic sweep in Tuesday’s midterms that ousted Republican Governor Greg Abbott, a close ally of President Donald Trump who has cracked down on immigration with ICE raids since returning to office last year. Abbott will be replaced by Democrat Gina Hinojosa, the first Latina woman elected governor of Texas.
Whitmire had tried a similar restriction earlier this year. In April, the City Council passed an ordinance limiting how long officers could detain people while waiting for ICE agents, but Abbott threatened to revoke $110 million in public safety funding from Houston, and city officials backed down. Whitmire acknowledged the new change could bring political risks, as Abbott and other Republicans remain in power until January.
Houston Police Chief J. Noe Diaz said he supported the change and that the department had already begun implementing it. According to the department’s first two reports, officers contacted ICE nearly 200 times from April through September, including at least 36 instances in which people were handed directly to ICE.
ICE reacted critically to the change in a statement on social media, arguing that some offences classified as nonviolent can be serious. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonpartisan think tank, Texas has had more arrests carried out by ICE agents during Trump’s second term than any other state, with almost 137,000 recorded as of August 2026. Texas also holds the highest number of ICE detainees in the US, with more than 16,000 people held, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
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