The Austin Police Department will change its rules over how officers report people to ICE, after the detention and apparent deportation of a Honduran mother and her 5-year-old daughter revealed the extent that local officers are cooperating with federal immigration authorities.
APD Chief Lisa Davis told The Texas Newsroom that she will create new department “general orders” that will explicitly state that local police can cooperate more fully with federal immigration officers in the execution of immigration warrants. She said the change reflects the fact that state law gives officers greater discretion in contacting ICE than is outlined in the department’s current policy.
“Officers may but are not required to call ICE,” Davis told The Texas Newsroom in an interview on Tuesday.
In a follow up email ahead of publication, APD spokesperson Anna Sabana said, “Chief Davis said the rule change comes after city legal advised her that current general orders should address administrative warrants and ensure mandates of [Senate Bill 4] are adhered to.”
The move comes after immigration advocates and legal experts raised questions about APD’s decision to turn over a Honduran mother and her young daughter to ICE earlier this month.
APD officers called U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement after encountering the woman during a disturbance call. In a statement, Davis initially said APD was required to notify ICE because the woman had an ICE “administrative warrant.” In fact, Austin police officers have reported dozens of people with similar warrants to ICE since President Donald Trump started his second term, city records show.
Legal experts questioned whether this cooperation was required, noting the department’s policy only required contact with ICE for people who federal authorities have formally requested they detain.
But Davis said the department’s policy has been out of step with state law and needs updating. She said local police will now be able to freely contact ICE and may even ask for the immigration status of people they encounter, a notable departure from current policy that has discouraged prioritizing immigration enforcement.
“I have no doubt that officers have been confused on this,” she said. Adding that the new general order “is going to help with that confusion.”
While ICE actions in Austin have remained relatively low profile, the move comes as immigration enforcement has become a part of daily life in some US cities, prompting nationwide protests.
APD reported dozens of people to ICE
APD’s current policy, General Order 318.3.4, only explicitly mandates officers alert ICE when a so-called “ICE detainer” or request to hold a person is issued.
A detainer is a formal request from federal authorities to hold someone in police custody for a suspected immigration violation. Administrative warrants, by contrast, are routinely issued by federal agents to flag someone who may have violated civil immigration law.
Administrative warrants and detainers “are different things in federal immigration law,” Elissa Steglich, co-director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin, told The Texas Newsroom. She said as far as she can tell, “there is room for Austin to not notify ICE” regarding warrants.
But lawyers working for the city disagreed, according to Davis.
She said they advised her recently that APD cannot stop officers from contacting ICE when they uncover administrative warrants under state laws. Those laws require local police to cooperate with federal law enforcement and allow local officers to detain people they suspect of being undocumented. Some of these provisions are being challenged in court.
“Senate Bill 4 does not allow us to tell officers they cannot call ICE on these things,” Davis told The Texas Newsroom.
Davis said she was unaware that department policy needed to be updated until after the incident with the Honduran mother and her child this month. Advocates with Grassroots Leadership said the pair was deported, despite them saying the daughter is a U.S. citizen, after APD reported them to ICE.
The Texas Newsroom was unable to independently confirm this information.
Davis said ICE notified APD of the uptick in administrative warrants in early 2025, when immigration authorities flooded a federal police database with 14,000 warrants under the second Trump administration.
Some officers began reporting people with these warrants to ICE but APD policy was never updated to reflect their ability to do so, Davis added.
Since January 2025, Austin officers have reported people with administrative warrants to ICE dozens of times. The City of Austin requires APD to file quarterly reports detailing police interactions with Immigration and Customs Enforcement over someone’s immigration status. An analysis of these reports shows that APD contacted ICE 33 times from January through September of last year.
Data for the fourth quarter of last year has yet to be released.
Some of the people reported to ICE were reaching out to police for help. In one instance, a man contacted EMS “to speak with a doctor about his mental health.” EMS contacted APD, which found that the person was the subject of what the report calls an “ICE warrant.”
“Officers contacted ICE,” the report described, “but no federal officials were available.”
In this case, EMS voluntarily took the caller to the hospital. It’s unclear whether immigration agents contacted that person after he was discharged.
In total, around 13 of the individuals who were determined to have ICE warrants were not taken into custody.
In eight instances, the people were booked into the Travis County jail, from which ICE routinely takes people into its custody. Four times, ICE arrived at the scene of an APD investigation to immediately take people into custody.
Davis said she was unaware local police were present during ICE apprehensions until this month.
The city reports also documented the race/ethnicity of the people reported to ICE: 26 were listed as Hispanic, eight as White and one as Middle Eastern. The reporting did not indicate if any of those people listed as White also identify as another ethnicity as well.
Advocates say that administrative warrants are commonly applied even to immigrants pursuing legal asylum claims. They worry that migrants who may have been flagged with a warrant without being aware may misunderstand their risk of deportation when interacting with local police.
“They may not be aware that [in] calling the police, or coming into contact with police, their information may be run and they will then have ICE called on them,” Sabina Hinz-Foley Trejo, an organizer with the group Grassroots Leadership, told The Texas Newsroom.
How APD policy on ICE will change
Davis said that she does not believe the new policy will contradict earlier statements she made that it is not APD’S job to enforce civil warrants.
Last year, she told The Texas Newsroom that officers lose community trust and their ability to fight crime when they become immigration enforcers. She said at the time, “We do not ask about immigration status here in Austin.”
She said the new general orders will specify a chain of communication that officers must observe when they decide to notify ICE that they have found someone with an administrative warrant. Under her proposal, officers will first notify a duty commander that they intend to contact immigration authorities.
“The officer may want to call ICE and may opt to do that [...] the decision to remain on scene will be with the commander,” Davis said. “The decision to wait would be on a commander.”
She said some details of the new policy are still awaiting input from city legal staff. But the city and police department may be releasing more information about the changes by the end of the week, according to an APD spokesperson.
The Texas Newsroom asked if the changes to policy mean Chief Davis may stop telling the public that APD officers do not ask about people’s immigration status. She replied, “you know what? I don't know how to answer that.”
