A public meeting billed as a “conversation” about Austin Police and immigration enforcement sounded more like a protest for much of Thursday night, as shouting and heckling laid bare a community divide over how forcefully the progressive city of Austin should resist the Trump administration’s deportation push.
The meeting was held to address policy changes the Austin police department is planning over how APD officers interact with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Austin City Council members and APD Chief Lisa Davis say they want to do everything they can to make sure people don’t end up detained by ICE after interacting with local police. Davis has said immigration enforcement distracts from the job of criminal law enforcement and erodes the trust of immigrant communities.
But a state law called S.B. 4, passed in 2017 by Texas’s Republican-controlled state legislature, prohibits police departments from telling officers they can not contact federal immigration agents.
“Senate Bill Four does not allow for that,” Chief Davis told the capacity audience in the school cafeteria. “There is a rule of law that I have to follow as the chief of police here in the state of Texas.”
It was that comment, made early in the talk, that sparked the first eruption of heckling and booing. Many more would follow.
The message from some in the crowd: the chief and council members should resist the federal and state ICE crackdown outright, even if it brings legal action from the state and costs them their jobs, a distinct possibility under S.B. 4.
“Are you too afraid to lose your position that you will not do what is right?” asked Robert Saulter, a criminal defense lawyer who was one of the most vocal in the audience, which over-filled the 200-person capacity space.
Saulter suggested that a blanket refusal to follow the S.B. 4 would gum up ICE operations in the city and lead to court decisions that could see the law thrown out as unconstitutional.
Others called on the city government to take a more public role in resisting local ICE actions, like they see happening in cities like Chicago and Minneapolis.
Mayor Pro Tem Chito Vela, who was a career immigration attorney before being elected to council, said that idea made little sense in Texas.
“Those are blue states with Democratic governors, with largely pro-immigrant policies,” said Vela. “We have still seen ICE essentially run rampant through those communities, even in a situation where the police department has the full support of the Governor.”
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news but I have to tell you the truth,” Vela continued, as some audience members renewed shouts of “coward!” that they aimed at city officials throughout the night.
‘There exists no law to protect us.’
Austin city council members and police leaders have long said that they want members of the undocumented immigrant community to feel unafraid to call the police to seek aid.
But the distance between that goal and reality was exposed after news emerged last month that a Honduran woman, Karen Gutierrez-Castellanos, and her 5-year-old child were deported after calling in a disturbance complaint to Austin Police.
In that case, an officer checked Gutierrez-Castellanos's background in a database and found she had been flagged by ICE with an “administrative warrant” for potentially being in the country without authorization.
It was not the only time this has happened.
Records show that Austin officers called ICE dozens of times last year after encountering people flagged with ICE warrants. Those warrants do not indicate a criminal offense but have flooded police databases since Donald Trump retook the presidency with promises of mass deportation.
Chief Davis says the new APD policy will make that less likely to happen.
The rules are still under consideration, but Davis says they would require that an officer who decides to report someone to ICE also call their commander to inform them of that decision.
“The commander will make the decision on whether [police officers] are gonna be waiting for ICE,” Davis said Thursday. “And I can tell you, the priority is not waiting for ICE to respond.”
The police department is simply too short-staffed, she said.
City and police officials arrived at the new policy because they believe it to be permissible under S.B. 4, which levies fines and calls for the removal of city officials who discourage officers from working with immigration agents in most cases.
At Thursday’s meeting, Chief Davis and some speakers proposed further updates that, they say, could prevent people from being deported.
One proposal was to have officers inform people that immigration agents may be notified of their presence, but they are free to leave if not under detention. Another was to urge undocumented immigrants to call a victims services hotline instead of 9-1-1 to report a crime.
But none of those plans guarantee that police won’t share people's information, including their home addresses, with ICE agents.
As long as that possibility exists, immigrants and advocacy groups say people will think twice before contacting APD.
“I don’t have confidence in the police,” Carmen Zuvieta, an immigrant activist with the Austin Sanctuary Network, told the city officials in Spanish. “You are going to leave our fate up to the feelings of a police officer and not up to the law. Because there exists no law to protect us.”
