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Kyle McClenagan\/Houston Public Media<\/p>\n
Houston Mayor John Whitmire and Houston Police Chief Noe Diaz speak at an HPD facility groundbreaking on July 9, 2026.<\/p>\n
Houston Mayor John Whitmire\u2019s administration has again delayed an application<\/a> for a $150 million grant<\/a> from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).<\/p>\n The city council was slated to consider the application on Wednesday, but the administration pulled the item from the agenda on Monday. <\/p>\n The funding would come from the DOJ’s Model Cities Initiative. DOJ’s grant guidelines<\/a> state “applicants must ensure that their initiatives align” with a number of priorities, including “immigration law enforcement operations.”<\/p>\n Sign up for the Hello, Houston!<\/a> daily newsletter to get local reports like this delivered directly to your inbox.<\/p>\n After questions from Houston Public Media last week, Mayor John Whitmire’s administration pulled the grant application<\/a> from the city council’s agenda for the Sept. 16 meeting. <\/p>\n In an interview on Friday, Whitmire downplayed the connection between the grant and immigration enforcement. <\/p>\n “It sure kind of alarms me when you make people think we\u2019re trying to get money for immigration enforcement,” Whitmire said. “We don\u2019t enforce immigration. You know that. We follow the state law.”<\/p>\n The Houston Police Department (HPD) requires officers to contact U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) when they encounter someone with a civil immigration warrant, and officers are allowed to wait a “reasonable amount of time” for federal agents to arrive. <\/p>\n Related: Revised HPD-ICE policy allows city police to hold people \u2018reasonable amount of time’<\/a><\/p>\n When the city council and Whitmire attempted to curtail coordination with ICE in April, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to revoke more than $110 million in public safety funding to Houston. <\/p>\n “We\u2019re asking for a clarification [on the DOJ grant guidelines], but the best legal analysis we\u2019ve gotten internally through from HPD is it\u2019s really not anything more than what we\u2019re doing now,” Whitmire said. “Just following the state law and city ordinances on warrants.”<\/p>\n In its guidelines, DOJ set out a Sept. 1 deadline for applications. A DOJ spokesperson declined to answer multiple questions from Houston Public Media, including whether it would grant an extension to Houston. <\/p>\n “We have received dozens of applications and are actively reviewing them,” the DOJ spokesperson said via email. “We have nothing further to add beyond the guidance that has already been released.”<\/p>\n