Travis County sheriff Sally Hernandez has said she will defy federal authorities on immigration – prompting the Texas governor to threaten her removal

Donald Trump was elected on 8 November, and so was Sally Hernandez. The new Travis County sheriff chose the president’s inauguration day last Friday to make the politically charged announcement that she would introduce a new “sanctuary” policy for her jurisdiction that provides some protection for undocumented immigrants, just as Trump was denouncing them.

Hernandez plans to limit her department’s cooperation with immigration authorities, joining other “sanctuary cities” around the US. The timing is incendiary, as Trump issued an order this week to seek funding cuts in cities with “sanctuary” policies that seek to protect immigrants.



For Hernandez, however, the greatest threat to her program may be her own state’s leader. Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, threatened to oust the Democrat – who campaigned on the issue and was elected by the people of a county that includes left-leaning Austin, the state capital. “We are going to crack down on this and ban sanctuary cities in Texas,” the Republican governor told Fox News. If she did not reverse course, “we will remove her from office”, he declared.

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The backlash has turnedAustin into an early battleground for a fight that is expected to be replicated around the country as large Democratic-led cities push back against edicts from the Trump administration that press local police to grow more involved in immigration enforcement.

“He probably can’t do anything like that, but the fact that’s even mentioned on national television is beyond disturbing,” said Eddie Rodriguez, a Democratic state representative in Travis County and policy chair of the state Mexican American Legislative Caucus.

“It would be laughable if it wasn’t so damn scary … based on what I’ve seen the president of the United States do in his first week in office, I have no reason any more to think that these things aren’t possible. I want to be proven wrong, in my gut I say: ‘That’s not going to happen,’ but I’ve learned in my many years of politics that you have to take people at their word.”

Abbott is a longtime opponent of sanctuary cities, which are typically, if informally, defined as places with policies that restrict local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

The sheriff’s rationale echoes worries expressed by other police chiefs around the country who are concerned that turning local police into immigration enforcers will erode community trust and affect the ability to prevent and solve crimes.

“We cannot afford to make our community less safe by driving people into the shadows,” Hernandez said in a YouTube video last Friday. “As local law enforcement officers, we will not interrogate or arrest someone over an unrelated federal immigration matter if they are trying to report a crime. The public must be confident that local law enforcement is focused on local public safety, not on federal immigration enforcement. Our jail cannot be perceived as a holding tank for Ice [Immigration and Customs Enforcement].”

When non-US citizens are detained by local police on suspicion of committing a crime, Ice may issue a detainer – a request that the department hold the individual for up to an extra 48 hours after they would normally have been released (excluding weekends and holidays). This gives the federal agency time to take the person into custody if the individual is considered deportable.

Detainers are controversial: their level of use varies widely depending on local policies and critics argue they are unconstitutional because they entail detentions based on what are merely requests, not warrants based on probable cause.



The governor has no apparent legal pathway to force out Hernandez by himself. But he is threatening to cut state grant money – just as Trump has said he intends to do – and the Republican-dominated state legislature may soon pass a law banning the cities.

A bill mandating close teamwork with a federal agency would be a curiosity in a state that has spent much of the past eight years devoting great effort to pushing back against the government in Washington and stressing an ethos of limited central regulations.

“You constantly hear about this notion of local control on the side of my Republican colleagues … ‘We don’t dictate from the top of Austin, Texas, down to your hometown’. And this is exactly the opposite of that,” Rodriguez said.

Still, though immigration is a federal responsibility, Texas lawmakers have previously shown enthusiasm for getting involved. In 2015, they approved an $800m spend on border security over two years. More may be on the way, though the state is presently grappling with a dip in revenue amid the oil and gas downturn that is putting more pressure on struggling social services.

In a letter to Hernandez, Abbott warned that her policy risked unleashing dangerous foreign felons on to the streets of Texas and pledged to withhold future criminal justice division grant money, which last year was worth $1.8m to Travis County.

The division provides services such as helping crime victims, combatting violence against women and preventing child sex trafficking.

In an apparent escalation, Abbott’s office sent a letter on Thursday asking state agencies to list all the funds they provided to Travis County in fiscal year 2016, the Texas Tribune reported.

Also on Thursday, Hernandez issued a statement saying she “will not allow fear and misinformation to be my guiding principles” and is “following all state and federal laws, and upholding constitutional rights to due process for all in our criminal justice system”.

Abbott told Fox: “What she is doing under her plan, she would give sanctuary to people who are in the United States illegally, who have been convicted of crimes in the past, of heinous crimes like armed robbery; they could have been operating in conjunction with drug cartels, and she would not cooperate with Ice whatsoever.”

But her stance is more nuanced: her office will comply with Ice requests to hold those suspected of serious felonies such as murder.

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Hernandez said in her video message that her department would work with all law enforcement agencies to honour “all lawfully issued warrants”, such as those that Ice may seek from a judge, and that she was concerned that detainers were sometimes issued erroneously and that keeping people in jail for longer than necessary tied up resources and put extra strain on families. “Everybody arrested in Travis County will be treated the same under the law, as our constitution requires,” she said.

The city of Austin was also finalising plans to provide funding for legal services that will aid 100 immigrant cases a month, said Gregorio Casar, a council member.

More than a third of his district’s residents were non-US citizens, he said. “Trump’s attempts to coerce local police departments to become deportation agents are not only unconstitutional and racist but they are dangerous for our public safety,” added Casar, who was born in Texas to Mexican immigrants.

“The fact of the matter is, what Trump and Abbott are advocating for is for local officials to detain people without warrants and that’s unconstitutional and un-American.”