HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — A call to police is supposed to be a call for help, but for some Houstonians, that call could lead to contact with federal immigration authorities.<\/p>\n
Recently released data from the Houston Police Department showed that happened dozens of times in the last few months.<\/p>\n
Between April and June, HPD officers contacted ICE more than 100 times after encountering people with immigration warrants, according to the data.<\/p>\n
34 of those contacts happened during calls for service.<\/p>\n
The calls ranged from suspicious people, suspicious vehicles, assaults, sexual assaults, thefts, and welfare checks.<\/p>\n
In six of those cases, someone was ultimately transferred into ICE custody.<\/p>\n
HPD’s data does not identify who that person was, so it could have been the person who called police or someone else involved in the investigation.<\/p>\n
“There are some times where you might look at a situation and say, ‘Okay, we’re actually happy in this situation that ICE got involved.’ And I think there’s also plenty of situations where you look at it and say that this is not how it’s supposed to work, right? This person had a serious issue with somebody else, but because they tried to address it, now they’re the ones detained,” South Texas College of Law Houston Professor Scott Rempell said.<\/p>\n
Rempell said when undocumented immigrants don’t know what a call for help could lead to, that fear can spread and keep victims from reaching out.<\/p>\n
As ABC13 reported, sometimes ICE is involved even when HPD says they don’t call.<\/p>\n
According to a police report, a man who called HPD on Sunday about someone firing a gun in the air at a Home Depot parking lot was ultimately taken into ICE custody after helping police identify the suspect. The suspect ended up being a convicted felon and was arrested.<\/p>\n
“We have an entire group in our community who is too scared even to call the police when they’re victims of a crime,” Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare said.<\/p>\n
For some victims, DA Teare said calling police can feel more dangerous than the crime itself.<\/p>\n
“These people are living in such fear while they’re being abused daily, while they’re being victimized, and yet they’re more scared of ICE than they are of the person that’s harming them,” Teare said.<\/p>\n
Copyright \u00a9 2026 KTRK-TV. All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — A call to police is supposed to be a call for help, but for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":405177,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[141927,56,58,57],"class_list":["post-405176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-141927","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405176","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=405176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405176\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/405177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=405176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=405176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=405176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}