Houston mayor limits police cooperation with ICE after Democratic wins

By Uriel J. García, The Texas Tribune
November 6, 2026

Houston Mayor John Whitmire directed police to limit cooperation with immigration officers during traffic stops — months after Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to withhold millions in state funding over the city’s past restrictions on cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“I do this to begin a healing process — reduce fear and anxiety across our community,” Whitmire said during Friday’s news conference. “I also do this knowing that elections matter.”

The announcement comes after Democrats won statewide elections this week for top offices after years of Republican dominance. Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa ousted Abbott and had been critical of Abbott’s immigration policies.

Whitmire said his executive order tells police officers to contact ICE officers only for a jailable offense and if a suspect has an ICE warrant. Houston police will cite and release people for nonviolent cases.

“It’s to reduce the fear and anxiety, not just in some of our communities but across Houston,” Whitmire said at a Friday press conference.

Houston Police Chief J. Noe Diaz said at the news conference he agreed with the mayor’s executive order, adding that his officers won’t contact ICE if someone has an immigration warrant — as long as that person has not committed a jailable offense.

“If our police officers pull someone over for a minor traffic infraction and they write a citation, that person receives the citation and goes about their day,” Diaz said. “HPD will no longer contact ICE if they have an administrative warrant and they are not arrested.”

The mayor’s announcement comes amid intense public scrutiny of ICE’s tactics in Houston, where Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare recently announced that a grand jury indicted ICE agent Mario Alberto Morales on a charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

The prosecutor said Morales intentionally struck an undocumented Mexican man with his vehicle. Teare is also investigating the July 7 fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by an immigration agent.

After President Donald Trump returned to the White House, his administration added more than 700,000 administrative immigration warrants to a national criminal database used by police departments across the country.

Houston police leaders directed officers to contact ICE when they encountered someone with one of those warrants. Unlike criminal warrants signed by judges, administrative ICE warrants are issued by immigration officials and often identify people with civil violations such as outstanding deportation orders.

The city’s decision to honor ICE warrants became controversial after the Houston Chronicle revealed that local police had contacted ICE at least 107 times in the first eight months of 2025, compared to nine times in all of 2024. In one case, an officer learned that a woman who called to report a domestic violence incident had an ICE warrant under her name. The officer called ICE, but no agents responded to the scene.

In April, Houston City Council adopted an ordinance eliminating a policy requiring officers to wait 30 minutes for ICE agents to arrive at traffic stops initiated by Houston police.

In response, Abbott threatened to withdraw roughly $110 million in state public safety grants, arguing the ordinance violated the state’s 2017 Senate Bill 4, which makes it illegal for a police department to limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities. As a state lawmaker, Whitmire voted against SB 4.

City Council subsequently revised the ordinance, and Houston police issued new instructions requiring officers to contact ICE when they encountered someone with an administrative immigration warrant. The department told officers to wait a “reasonable” amount of time for immigration agents to take custody of the immigrant.

Abbott’s office didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment from The Texas Tribune.

In Austin, Mayor Kirk Watson asked the police chief and city manager Friday to revise the city’s policy governing ICE warrants after facing similar pressure from Abbott to cooperate with federal immigration agents.

Houston Controller Chris Hollins, who was among several city officials who called on police to stop cooperating with ICE, said Whitmire’s decision was “a promising first step.”

But Hollins also said the mayor should have acted sooner, before Democrats dominated the statewide elections.

“ICE killing a man in our city and running over another wasn’t enough to move the mayor,” Hollins said in a statement. “I’m glad an election was.”

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.