If federal immigration agents don’t show up within 30 minutes, HPD will release the person they have detained.

HOUSTON — Houston Mayor John Whitmire and Police Chief Noe Diaz announced Wednesday that the Houston Police Department will require a supervisor on scene for any stop involving an administrative immigration warrant, following reports that at least two officers had acted outside the department’s established policy.

Under the new directive, when an officer receives a hit for an administrative immigration warrant, a sergeant must be called to the scene to review the circumstances and confirm the warrant’s validity. Federal law enforcement will then have a 30-minute window to respond. If they don’t show up, the person is released. Officers will also not transport anyone solely based on an immigration warrant.

Whitmire has maintained that HPD officers are not immigration agents and should not act like them.

“HPD is not ICE, not immigration officers, they’re HPD officers,” he said.

FIEL, an advocacy organization for immigrants civil rights, was critical of the change and statements, calling leadership liars.

“Mayor Whitmire is not doing anything special. He is just safeguarding the city from violations to our constitution. This policy is something that should have been in place from day one. We have known that Houston PD has collaborated with ICE in the past and for many months, Chief Diaz and Whitmire lied. They continue to hide under the guise of SB4 instead of showing true leadership and challenging these unfair laws. Let us remind Whitmire that other countries have had ‘laws’ that were unjust and courageous people took a stand to change history,” read the statement from FIEL’s Cesar Espinosa.

The mayor praised Houston’s approach compared to other cities that have seen more conflict with federal immigration authorities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, Memphis and Minneapolis.

“I disagree with people without being disagreeable,” Whitmire said. “We follow the law.”

He was critical of officers in other cities who he said invited unnecessary confrontation, and took aim at mayors who he said “shoot the bird, talk vulgar” and “plant the seeds of disruption across major cities in our nation.”

Diaz said the department has been closely tracking every immigration-related contact since administrative warrants began appearing in the National Crime Information Center database in large numbers last year.

“We, as an organization within the command staff, we started tracking every single one because I foresaw that we would get to today because it’s a very sensitive topic,” Diaz said.

He said out of roughly 350,000 police reports filed in 2025, officers logged approximately 220 NCIC hits for immigration warrants. Of those, more than half were released on the scene. Just 85 people out of over 1.1 million community contacts were turned over to immigration enforcement, and only 17 were transported to meet ICE.

Diaz said the directive is designed to ensure both consistency and decency in how people are treated.

“I want to make sure they’re respected, that there’s decency involved in their handling,” he said.

He also pushed back on any suggestion that the department is indifferent to the human side of immigration enforcement, noting that the issue is personal to him.

“I’ve got family members that have green card statuses that can’t travel to see loved ones for fear of not being able to come back,” Diaz said. “That’s real to me, that’s real to this team.”

Whitmire acknowledged the two officers who went beyond policy but framed the situation as a normal part of refining any institution.

“There’s no perfect ordinance, no perfect law,” he said. “Every product that government outlines can be improved.”

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