Members of four activist groups gathered in front of the Travis County Administration Building Wednesday morning with a warning for Austin’s immigrant community – U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are making more arrests in the area.
“There’s an escalation of ICE presence in Austin and brutality of ICE, as seen in Houston recently, and all over the city in the last week,” said Caitlin Corkill, an activist with Indivisible Austin and the Austin Sanctuary Network.
Corkill said the uptick is happening nationwide, with an estimated 10,000 immigrants having been detained by federal officials in recent days. The surge in arrests was first reported by the New York Times.
The protest in Austin came a day after an ICE agent fatally shot a Mexican man without legal status in Houston during what the agency called a “targeted enforcement operation.”
Austin Sanctuary Network’s hotline, which can be used to report arrests or request legal aid, has given the group insight into ICE’s presence locally.
Peggy Morton, the group’s chair, said she’s noticed more calls to the hotline and more requests for the group’s accompaniment program, which provides immigrants with rides to mandatory check-in appointments at the ICE office in San Antonio.
“I used to give rides … maybe two a month or three a month. Now it’s like four a week, and San Antonio is a long way off,” Morton said.
Morton said activists in Austin are particularly concerned with how and where ICE agents are making arrests. The group’s hotline received a call last week about a woman named Isalia Martinez, who is originally from Mexico, after she was detained in the parking lot of a CommUnity Care health clinic. Morton said Martinez has since been deported to an unfamiliar city in Mexico.
“A doctor’s office is a place where you should feel safe and secure without fear of being harmed,” Morton said.
Alejandro Caceres, an organizer with the Austin Sanctuary Network, called on Travis County leaders to do more to protect residents from being arrested while seeking medical care.
“Isalia was detained at CommUnity Care. That is a county-funded clinic,” Caceres said. “We have been coming to the same court for about two years now, telling [Travis County Judge] Andy Brown, ‘Hey, this is happening in your community, this is happening in Austin, this is happening in the streets,’ and it has felt [like] we’ve been speaking to a wall this whole time.”
It’s unclear how Travis County could intervene in immigration enforcement, even on county-funded properties. Counties in Texas are required to follow all federal and state laws, and they don’t have the power to pass ordinances like cities do.
Caceres said the Austin Sanctuary Network still plans to formally ask the county to look into how it can protect the immigrant community at the next Travis County Commissioners Court meeting on Tuesday.