Austin Police Chief Lisa Davis speaks during a town hall to address community concerns about Austin police officers cooperating with federal immigration agents at Govalle Elementary School in Austin in February. State leaders have shown no interest in those local concerns.
Mikala Compton/Austin American-Statesman
In 2017, Texas codified big government overreach in the name of public safety. Senate Bill 4 forces sheriffs to comply with immigration holds on people in the country without legal status and prohibits policies limiting law enforcement’s cooperation with federal immigration authorities. But holding people whose only potential crime is the question of how they entered the country does little to help public safety.
Now Austin officials find themselves caught between their duty to the community and the increasingly heavy hand of state power. Gov. Greg Abbott has threatened to pull $2.5 million in public safety grant money, as he has also recently threatened Houston, claiming Austin’s updated ICE policy doesn’t comply with those contracts. The city is also the focus of an investigation by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who claims the Austin Police Department’s policy on how officers collaborate with U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement violates state law.
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Before we turn to the policies, let’s not lose sight of the politics. Abbott is seeking a fourth term in office, and scandal-plagued Paxton is challenging U.S. Sen. John Cornyn this election. Sticking it to immigrants and Austin plays well with primary voters, no matter how ugly the rhetoric or the policies.
Amid broad disapproval of federal immigration enforcement efforts, Paxton’s investigation and any potential gubernatorial action against Austin are bad faith attempts to bully local authorities into compliance with directives that go against what leaders and residents want for their cities. Abbott’s threat, if made good, would undermine public safety. They should let Austin get back to governing itself.
All about politics
At the heart of these actions is a debate over whether ICE’s administrative warrants trigger compliance with SB4. The governor’s grant contracts stipulates Austin comply with the state statutes created by the law. SB4, however, makes no mention of administrative warrants because the intradepartmental documentation was not in the National Crime Information Center at the time. The Trump administration added administrative warrants to that crime database in February 2025.
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An administrative warrant should not be confused with a judicial warrant. They may share the word “warrant,” but they are two different processes. While judicial warrants go through a rigorous legal process, administrative warrants are issued by ICE or other Homeland Security agencies and signed by immigration officers or immigration judges, who are administrative employees of the executive branch, not the judiciary. There is no independent review.
Administrative warrants are glorified interoffice memos being used for political expedience, often at great cost. These warrants have the power to tear apart families who have not committed any crimes. Such federal enforcement may be warranted, or it may not be. But that is why we rely on judges to protect constitutional rights and to ensure independent review and due process.
FILE – Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC 2024, at the National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Md., Feb. 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)
Jose Luis Magana/AP
Paxton is investigating a March update to APD policy directing officers not to detain anyone based solely on an administrative warrant. Austin City Council Member José “Chito” Vela, an immigration lawyerwho helped city attorneys draft the policy, told the Statesman he is certain it complies with state law.
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Not about public safety
The governor’s Public Safety Office administers grants for everything from border area district attorney offices to child sex trafficking programs to crime victims’ assistance. The list goes on: anti-gang programs, cybersecurity, crisis intervention, improving the criminal justice system’s response to violence against women, bullet-resistant gear for peace officers, specialty courts for veterans and people with a history of sexual exploitation, addiction or mental health issues. There is even a grant for Abbott’s signature border project, Operation Lone Star.
We don’t live in a world in which clawing back these grants would somehow increase or improve public safety in Texas. We doubt Abbott — whose campaign website features a “Back the Blue” pledge expressing support for “any measure that discourages or stops efforts to defund police departments in Texas” — does either.
“Defunding our police departments would invite crime into our communities and put people in danger,” the pledge reads.
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We fail to see how clawing back state funding for local police departments would make Texas cities any safer. If Austin’s policy doesn’t fit the intent of SB4, then state lawmakers should amend the legislation next session. That would be the conservative thing to do.
Abbott’s press secretary Andrew Mahaleris told us policies like Austin’s make Texas “less safe.” He mentioned the 2024 death of Jocelyn Nungaray in Houston, for which two Venezuelan men suspected of being in the country without legal status face murder charges.
Let’s separate one tragedy from broader understanding. Myriad studies show crime rates for immigrants are lower than for citizens, and the American Immigration Council has found that as the immigrant population in the United States grew between 1980 and 2022, the overall crime rate fell.
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There is a cost to the community when it comes to overzealous, indiscriminate immigration enforcement. For example, federal immigration enforcement at the local level in Austin led to the deportation of Karen Gutiérrez Castellanos and her 5-year-old U.S. citizen daughter in January. She had called police for help, which led to deportation and an even more dangerous situation. Stories like these push immigrants into the shadows, make crime reporting less likely and erode trust in law enforcement.
Abbott’s public safety plan appears to push for the indiscriminate expedited deportation of immigrants by threatening funding cuts for police departments in cities whose voters back more moderate policies he disagrees with. That doesn’t make Texas a safer place by any metric. But safety isn’t the goal here. Abbott and Paxton have made local control subordinate to self-serving politics.