Houston Mayor John Whitmire has ordered the city's police to stop calling ICE on anyone who isn't arrested for a jailable offense, and says he cleared it with the Democrats who just won Texas. "SB4 is not a priority of the new statewide elected officials," Whitmire told reporters Friday, three days after Gov. Greg Abbott lost his bid for a fourth term.
"This morning, I have directed the chief and HPD through an executive order that we will change our policy in regarding contact with ICE," the mayor said. "I do this to begin a healing process, reduce fear and anxiety across our community. I also do this knowing that elections matter."
He said he had been in contact with the incoming statewide officials, whom he said he knows from serving with them in the Legislature, and had "consulted the new state leadership." Whitmire said he hopes the order becomes a "model for Texas cities," and that he will take responsibility for making the change "even with the current administration still in office for two months," the Daily Wire reported from the news conference.
What Changes On The Street
Under the order, officers will contact ICE only when they arrest someone for a jailable offense who also has an administrative immigration warrant. Police Chief J. Noe Diaz Jr. spelled out what that means for a traffic stop: "if our police officers pull someone over for a minor traffic infraction and they write a citation, that person receives a citation and goes about their day."
"HPD will no longer contact ICE if they have an administrative warrant and they are not arrested," Diaz said. The mayor's office put it more broadly in its post on X, saying police would "no longer contact ICE for nonviolent offences."
The April Climbdown
It is close to the policy Whitmire abandoned this spring. In April, the City Council passed an ordinance barring officers from detaining people on administrative immigration warrants. Two weeks later it was rewritten, after the state threatened to pull more than $110 million in public safety grants from a city it said was breaking Senate Bill 4, the 2017 law that bars Texas cities from limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities. The revised version said nothing in it limited the cooperation state law requires, and police were told to hold people long enough for ICE to take custody.
Abbott had made the stakes plain. Cities that refuse to help federal immigration authorities "forfeit the money" and must "repay to the state every single dollar they have received," he told the Daily Wire in an earlier interview. On Friday, Whitmire said he "had to listen" to Abbott back then because "our finances were at stake."
The pressure showed in the numbers well before any of that. The Houston Chronicle reported that HPD contacted ICE at least 107 times in the first eight months of 2025, against nine times in all of 2024, including a domestic violence call in which the caller had an ICE warrant and no agents ever came, Click2Houston noted.
SB 4 is still on the books, and Abbott remains governor until Hinojosa takes office in January.
Hinojosa's Texas
The order leans on Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa, who, as we reported, vowed to stop helping ICE and voted against SB 4 as a state lawmaker. "As governor, I will never offer up Texas as a staging ground for operations that terrorize families and enrich his donors," she said of Abbott at a Jan. 31 rally.
Washington wasn't impressed. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the department is "disappointed that sanctuary politicians seek to limit cooperation with ICE," pointing to three people ICE has arrested in Houston, among them a Cuban national wanted for homicide, Fox News reported.
Whitmire summed it up at the news conference: "This is the right thing to do at the right time."