What’s the urgency?

Houstonians must stand up to the fabricated panic of an invented immigration crisis.

A few days ago Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez announced that he was ending the partnership between his office and the federal Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — a partnership that, in effect, made his deputies immigration officers. Known as 287(g), the voluntary program trained a team of deputies to determine the immigration status of jailed suspects and hold those selected until ICE could pick them up and deport them.

The low-keyed former Houston police officer and city councilman seemed to go out of his way to avoid casting his decision as a political statement. Unlike his counterpart in Travis County, Sheriff Sally Hernandez, Gonzalez has avoided provoking the ire of Gov. Greg Abbott, who has made his crusade against socalled sanctuary cities an emergency item for the Legislature and has cut off state law-enforcement grants to Travis County in response to Hernandez’s decision not to cooperate with ICE unless serious crimes are at issue. Gonzalez explained that his office will continue responding to all of ICE’s detainer requests.

The sheriff framed his decision on 287(g) as a practical law-enforcement matter. Dealing with terrible jail overcrowding, critical staff shortages and a disturbingly low crime-clearance rate, he now has nine extra officers devoted to the needs of Harris County, not ICE.

Gonzalez’s sensible, pragmatic approach to an immigration issue is in sharp contrast to the Trump administration’s cruel, misguided and costly “military operation” against immigrants. President Donald Trump’s newly created enforcement priorities are creating havoc among immigrant communities; no doubt that’s purposeful. His anti-immigrant policies are sowing fear among immigrants living here legally and otherwise, threatening to tear apart families and soon will begin having a negative effect on local economies.

These are people whose only crime is to be living and working in this country without proper documentation. Certainly, it’s preferable that they be properly documented, but documented or not, the vast majority are harming no one (despite Trump’s ridiculous “bad hombres” bombast).

“What’s the urgency?” Sheriff Gonzalez asked when he talked to the Chronicle editorial board about his 287(g) decision.

What’s the urgency, indeed. In 2013, the U.S. Senate passed complex and comprehensive immigration reform legislation that would have gone a long way toward resolving most of the issues that continue to vex the nation today. The legislation would have set up workable guest-worker programs, rewritten rules for skilled workers from India and elsewhere, vastly upgraded border security and provided a path toward legalization for the 11 million or so who are living and working in this country without authorization. The House rejected the legislation, primarily because of members’ animus against legalization. In the current anti-immigrant atmosphere, comprehensive immigration reform is as dead as the new president’s promise to bring America together.

Instead, the White House and its Republican allies in Congress have chosen a costly and shortsighted approach that dehumanizes immigrants, ignores the reality of their contributions to the nation’s economy and belies our image worldwide as a “shining city on a hill.” Again, where’s the urgency that demands such cruel and disruptive actions?

Conservative columnist David Brooks of the New York Times, writing last week about a GOP-sponsored bill to drastically cut legal immigration, described the GOP’s straitened view as, in the words of the headline, “a national death wish.” He posited a much more hopeful, confident and farsighted approach that’s exemplified by a city Chronicle readers know well, a city that is “incredibly diverse” ... “incredibly dynamic” ... “the fastestgrowing big city in America recently.” That city is, of course, our own.

“The large immigrant population has paradoxically given the city a very strong, very patriotic and cohesive culture, built around being welcoming to newcomers and embracing the future,” Brooks wrote.

The columnist’s only complaint about Houston is that it’s “pretty ugly.” (He blames lack of zoning.) However unattractive we might be to Brooks, we’re nowhere near as ugly as Trump’s antiimmigrant crusade. It’s costly, it’s dangerous and, in our view, it’s anti-American.

Neither Trump nor Abbott nor their GOP cohorts waging holy war against the immigrants living here illegally are going to moderate — in fact, things are likely to get even uglier — but at least Houston can resist to the extent that it’s possible. Sheriff Gonzalez’s decision on 287(g) was a modest act of resistance, regardless of whether he wants to characterize it that way. In the coming months and years, religious groups, social service agencies, city government, friends and neighbors of immigrants and Houstonians from all walks of life must be prepared to do likewise.