(The Center Square) – In the largest city and county in Texas, known to law enforcement as a cartel hub, the Harris County Jail is responsible for detaining criminals, including violent ones in the country illegally. In 2017, its newly elected sheriff, Ed Gonzalez, a Democrat, terminated a preexisting agreement between the jail and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Gonzalez campaigned on ending the jail’s agreement with ICE. Now running for his third term, plagued by a lawsuit from his own deputies over working conditions and skyrocketing crime, he remains committed to the county’s so-called “sanctuary city” status. Democratic leaders in Houston, the county seat, also remain committed to its sanctuary status.
Gonzalez, who’s openly opposed deporting illegal foreign nationals for years, was nominated by President Joe Biden to be the director of ICE in 2021, which never came to fruition. Some Texas Congressional Democrats also voted against deporting violent offenders, including child sex offenders, The Center Square reported.
Under Democratic leadership, crime escalated in Houston and Harris County. By 2021, Houston led the U.S. in a homicide surge, The Center Square reported. Despite recent claims that crime was down, an investigation found that more than 264,000 Houston Police Department crime reports, including violent crimes, weren’t investigated, forcing the police chief to resign. Some Democratic judges also continue to release violent offenders into the community, prompting a bipartisan effort, Stop Houston Murders, to remove them at the ballot box. Crime remains the top concern among voters polls show.
In 1996, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act added Section 287(g) to the Immigration and Nationality Act. It authorized ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) officers to designate some state and local law enforcement officers with specific immigration officer functions under its oversight.
“The 287(g) Program enhances the safety and security of our nation’s communities” by allowing ICE ERO officers “to partner with state and local law enforcement agencies to identify and remove incarcerated criminal noncitizens who are amenable to removal from the U.S. before they are released into the community,” ICE explains.
ICE also maintains that arresting and removing noncitizens “who undermine the safety of our nation’s communities and the integrity of U.S. immigration laws,” is paramount.
According to a recent records request from Fox News, 10% of inmates in the Harris County Jail have an ICE detainer, which is a request to hold the inmate for 48 hours until ICE ERO officers can take them into custody. Of the jail’s 9,527 inmates, 1,170 have ICE detainer requests. Among them are 174 linked to sexual assault cases; more than half involve children under age 14; 75 are murder cases, 22 are capital murder.
Under the Biden-Harris administration, ICE Deputy Director Patrick Lechleitner said, sanctuary policies are hurting Americans and noncitizens. Some local jurisdictions “have reduced their cooperation with ICE, to include refusal to honor ICE detainer requests, even for noncitizens who have been convicted of serious felonies and pose an ongoing threat to public safety” he said in a letter to Congress, due to their so-called “sanctuary city” policies. “However, ‘sanctuary’ policies can end up shielding dangerous criminals, who often victimize those same communities,” he said.
Because local jurisdictions nationwide refused to cooperate with ICE, the agency lifted detainers for 24,796 known criminals and released them into the U.S., he said. The data is from Oct. 1, 2020, through July 22, 2024.
Among them, state and local law enforcement agencies refused to comply with 23,591 detainer requests; 1,205 detainer requests were lifted “due to insufficient notice to ICE.”
As of July 21, 2024, “there were 662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories on ICE’s national docket, which includes those detained by ICE, and on the agency’s non-detained docket,” Lechleitner explained. “Of those, 435,719 are convicted criminals, and 226,847 have pending criminal charges,” The Center Square reported.
This includes criminal foreign nationals convicted of, or charged with, homicide (14,914), sexual assault (20,061), assault (105,146), kidnapping (3,372), and commercialized sexual offenses, including sex trafficking (3,971).
ICE operates two 287 (g) programs. Its Jail Enforcement Model, enabling some law enforcement personnel in county jails to “identify and process removable noncitizens – with criminal or pending criminal charges – who are arrested by state or local law enforcement agencies.” Its Warrant Service Officer program “allows ICE to train, certify and authorize state and local law enforcement officers to serve and execute administrative warrants on noncitizens in their agency’s jail.”
As of May 2024, ICE has 287(g) JEM agreements with 60 law enforcement agencies in 16 states and 287(g) WSO agreements with 75 law enforcement agencies in 11 states.
This includes 26 sheriff’s offices in Texas, excluding Harris County.
More than 387,000 criminal noncitizens were arrested by ICE ERO agents in fiscal years 2021 through 2023, The Center Square first reported. The majority were arrested in Dallas and Houston.
