The Austin Police Department released new guidelines for how its officers contact Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to report people suspected of being in the country without authorization.
The new rules, posted this week to a city website without fanfare, come after protests over increased cooperation between Austin police and ICE.
The rules are similar to proposals APD Chief Lisa Davis made in February that, she said, would reduce the likelihood of ICE involvement in local policing.
While state laws forbid Texas cities from telling officers they cannot report people to ICE, the new guidelines add layers of oversight when an officer decides to call federal agents.
The rules specifically clarify what officers should do when they run a background check on someone and find that ICE has flagged that person with a civil “administrative warrant,” saying they may be in the country without authorization.
ICE agents issued thousands of these non-criminal warrants in the first year of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
Under new APD policy, an officer cannot decide on their own to detain or arrest a person “based solely on an ICE Administrative Warrant.”
If an officer encounters someone with such a warrant who can be charged with “a separate arrestable criminal charge” the policy states the officer should arrest the person and bring them to jail, where they will likely be picked up by ICE.
If an officer encounters someone with an administrative warrant, but that person has not been charged with a crime, the officer must contact their APD supervisor if they plan to report the person to ICE.
If ICE requests the police hold the person until federal agents arrive to arrest them, the officer and their supervisor will kick that request further up the APD chain of command through a watch lieutenant to a duty commander.
The duty commander will have ultimate say over whether the officer can stay on site with the suspect.
At a public hearing last month, Davis said this policy will reduce the number of people APD detains for ICE arrest.
“The commander will make the decision on whether we are gonna be waiting for ICE. And I can tell you, the priority is not waiting for ICE to respond,” Davis said.
City officials had hope the new rules will thread the needle between local priorities and state law.
“APD has limitations, we’re trying to work within those limitations to try to maximize peoples safety,” City Councilmember Chito Vela told KUT last month as the policy was being formulated.
Those limitations include a state law known as Senate Bill 4.
Under the law, Passed in 2017, Texas cities cannot create policies that stop officers from calling ICE. But local police departments can decide to not to put resources toward immigration enforcement if doing so interferes with other police work.
“I think it’s no secret that we’re 320 officers shy of full staff,” Davis said at the Feb. 5 meeting. “[Immigration enforcement] is not a priority.”
Ian Adams, a professor of criminal justice at the University of South Carolina and a former police officer, said policies like the one announced in Austin may also dissuade officers from calling ICE by creating additional red tape around the process.
“I think that works in a lot of different professions,” Adams said. “If there’s some behavior that you can’t outright ban, you can always make the paperwork painful.”
Immigration advocates, including Kristin Etter, the director of policy and legal services at the Texas Immigration Law Council, say they are skeptical that new policies will increase trust between the immigrant community and law enforcement.
“It’s safe to assume that any time law enforcement is involved there is a risk of immigration detention — and then [being] placed in the deportation pipeline,” Etter said.
In cities and counties, the choice to report someone to ICE remains with individual officers under Texas state law, Etter said.
Texas State Police, who often operate in Austin city limits, are also empowered to enforce national immigration policy.