newly tweaked policies<\/a> for how officers work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement on certain arrest warrants for undocumented residents, and said Monday night that it would cooperate with the attorney general’s investigation.<\/p>\nIn a joint statement with APD, the city said its policy is “consistent” with state law. <\/p>\n
“It creates mechanisms that allow officers to provide reasonable or necessary assistance to ICE, while taking into consideration other legal constraints and our need to balance limited police resources in real-world situations,” a spokesperson for the city said.<\/p>\n
KUT reached out the attorney general’s office for a comment on the investigation but has not yet heard back.<\/p>\n
The police department changed its policy in March to reduce ICE intervention in local policing. The guidelines require officers to clear any call to ICE with a supervisor when a person is suspected of being in the country without authorization and has a non-criminal warrant, known as an administrative warrant. <\/p>\n
City guidelines require police to cooperate with ICE if someone who’s suspected of being undocumented faces a criminal charge. A state law, known as Senate Bill 4, bans cities from adopting policies that discourage police cooperation with ICE.<\/p>\n
Austin City Council Member Chito Vela told KUT that the city’s policy is in line with state law.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy office worked very carefully with the City Attorney\u2019s Office and consulted experts on SB4 … to ensure APD policy fully complies with both state laws and the U.S. Constitution,” he said. “I firmly believe any good-faith investigation will confirm that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Austin Police Department says Attorney General Ken Paxton launched an investigation into its cooperation with immigration authorities.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":249321,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[9258,132,134,133,1829,1724,3647],"class_list":{"0":"post-249320","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-austin","8":"tag-apd","9":"tag-austin","10":"tag-austin-headlines","11":"tag-austin-news","12":"tag-ice","13":"tag-immigration","14":"tag-immigration-and-customs-enforcement"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249320\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/249321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}