Felix Torres, 12, holds a sign during a news conference concerning a lawsuit filed by Erick Ruiz Lopez outside Houston Police Department headquarters in downtown Houston on Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2026.
Raquel Natalicchio/Houston Chronicle
Attorney Randall Kallinen speaks during a news conference concerning a lawsuit filed by Erick Ruiz Lopez, a Honduran man who alleges Houston police unlawfully detained him after a traffic stop until Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrived, outside Houston Police Department headquarters in downtown Houston on Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2026. Kallinen represents Lopez in the lawsuit.
Raquel Natalicchio/Houston Chronicle
Attorney Randall Kallinen speaks during a news conference concerning a lawsuit filed by Erick Ruiz Lopez, a Honduran man who alleges Houston police unlawfully detained him after a traffic stop until Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrived, outside Houston Police Department headquarters in downtown Houston on Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2026. Kallinen represents Lopez in the lawsuit.
Raquel Natalicchio/Houston Chronicle
Francisco Mendoza, 57, and his grandson, Felix Torres, 12, hold posters during a news conference concerning a lawsuit filed by Erick Ruiz Lopez outside Houston Police Department headquarters in downtown Houston on Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2026.
Raquel Natalicchio/Houston Chronicle
Attorney Randall Kallinen speaks during a news conference concerning a lawsuit filed by Erick Ruiz Lopez, a Honduran man who alleges Houston police unlawfully detained him after a traffic stop until Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrived, outside Houston Police Department headquarters in downtown Houston on Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2026. Kallinen represents Lopez in the lawsuit.
Raquel Natalicchio/Houston Chronicle
Family members, immigrant rights advocates and community members gather for a news conference following a lawsuit filed by Erick Ruiz Lopez, a man from Honduras who said Houston police unlawfully detained him after a traffic stop until ICE agents arrived, outside Houston Police Department headquarters in Houston, Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2026.
Raquel Natalicchio/Houston Chronicle
The sister of a Honduran man who is suing the Houston Police Department after officers allegedly detained him for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents said Tuesday that her brother’s deportation has left their family in anguish, and pleaded with police to stop cooperating with ICE on non-criminal warrants.
The lawsuit filed Monday by Erick Lopez resurfaces concerns that Houston police may be violating residents’ constitutional rights by holding them without criminal charges, marking the latest chapter in a long-running debate over how and whether the city should cooperate with ICE.
READ MORE: New report reveals how often Houston police turned people over to ICE
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Officers held Lopez, 29, for about two hours, the lawsuit asserts, after he allegedly ran a stop sign in June. HPD data show the average traffic stop that doesn’t involve ICE lasts about 18 minutes.
Lopez did not have a criminal record, his family and attorney said. ICE administrative warrants are civil, not criminal, documents, and do not by themselves give local police the authority to detain someone.
“That a traffic stop could lead to them taking him like this, and they had him waiting for so long — these have been days of distress,” said his sister said in Spanish. She declined to give her name due to fears of ICE retaliation.
Randall Kallinen, Lopez’s attorney, said that two hours should not be considered a “reasonable” amount of time to hold someone for a traffic stop, referring to HPD’s policy governing how long officers should wait for ICE agents to pick up drivers detained with civil immigration warrants.
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Houston City Council in April passed an ordinance tightening that “reasonable” standard, forcing officers to detain someone only “as long as reasonably necessary to complete the legitimate purpose of the initial stop or investigation.”
But the council backtracked two weeks later after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to pull $114 million in grant funding from the city. Houston police have now returned to the policy they have used for most of Trump’s second term, with officers waiting a “reasonable” amount of time for ICE agents to pick up drivers detained with immigration warrants.
By holding Lopez for two hours, Kallinen said, officers violated Lopez’s Fourth Amendment rights which protect people from excessive detention, regardless of citizenship status.
“The mayor and city council had a lot of debate about this, so they were fully aware of this going on prior to their final ordinance,” Kallinen said. “Yet we have all of these different cases which are violations of the Constitution, and when a government of any kind passes a law that doesn’t meet constitutional standards, the Constitution wins.”
The police department declined to comment, and referred reporters to the city’s legal department. Mayor John Whitmire’s office, which oversees the department, did not respond to a request for comment.
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Travis Fife, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, said the city should have seen the lawsuit coming.
“This is the very thing we warned about months ago, that the city could’ve protected itself from by adopting and sticking to the ordinance passed limiting cooperation with immigration officials,” Fife said. “Instead, the city cowered under the governor’s threats. And now the plaintiff in this case has paid the ultimate cost of deportation. And the city is on the hook for the potentially huge monetary cost.”
EXCLUSIVE: Houston vowed to curb ICE cooperation. Police still waited hours for agents.
Kallinen said that Lopez had lived in north Houston for about 10 years, and worked installing tiles to support his girlfriend and her two children.
Lopez was taken into custody on his birthday, after his family had cooked him dinner, his sister said. He is now back in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras.
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“They should stop detaining innocent people. The police are there to take care of us, so that we can trust them and not be scared of them,” she said. “He just worked and went home, he wasn’t out in the streets.”
Kallinen said he is requesting a class action lawsuit in this case, pointing to HPD’s own reporting that indicates 103 other people were referred to immigration agents in the first quarter of 2026 alone, 19 of whom were taken into ICE custody.