ICE-related crash puts driver in hospital
A driver was hospitalized after a car crash involving federal immigration agents in apparent pursuit of a truck in southwest Houston on Friday morning.
The incident came near the end of a tense week for immigrants in the country illegally after many shuttered themselves indoors in fear of a sweeping Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid that President Donald Trump announced last week. But the highly publicized raid, the second Trump has threatened in a month, did not appear to materialize on any large scale this week.
On Friday, business owners in a small shopping center said they saw several ICE agents near Parkfront and Harwin at about 8 a.m. The center includes a laundromat and a Central American restaurant and is near a mosque.
Witnesses told Cesar Espinosa, executive director of the advocacy group FIEL Houston, that immigration agents were pursuing the driver of a black truck, which then crashed into a red Chevrolet Camaro.
One person was taken to a hospital, according to Houston police, though it is unclear if that was the driver of the truck or of the Camaro or what the person’s immigration status is.
ICE officials said in a statement that they were not pursuing anyone “at the time of the accident.”
They declined to comment about whether they had been attempting to detain the driver of the truck or to provide more details, citing “law-enforcement sensitivities and the safety and security” of its agents.
Although ICE is one of the nation’s largest law enforcement agencies, records regarding its arrests are not public.
Onlookers took photos and video of several immigration agents in the shopping center.
Police said they responded to the crash between the truck and the Camaro at 8:25 a.m.
Business owners in the commercial center told Espinosa that they locked their doors and briefly closed their shops because they were afraid of the immigration agents.
The new ICE enforcement action was to start last Sunday and continue throughout the week, and was thought to focus on about 2,000 immigrants across the country who came here in the last year and received a final order of deportation. About 85 percent of such immigrants were ordered removed in absentia, meaning they were not in court, and the American Civil Liberties Union has argued in a lawsuit that many did not receive notice to attend their hearings.
Immigrants and advocates across the country were on high alert, and panicked reports of ICE activity spread widely on social media, but few arrests were reported.
Espinosa said his group had confirmed two enforcement actions: On Saturday, two men were arrested at an apartment complex in Spring Branch. On Monday, immigration agents descended on El Paraiso Apartments near Beechnut Street and Corporate Drive early in the morning, detaining several people.
Though ICE agents knocked on many doors, most immigrants did not answer. Agents need a judicial warrant to enter a home.
Trump maintained more immigrants had been arrested than reports indicated.
“Many, many were taken out on Sunday,” he told reporters at the White House Monday. “You just didn’t know about it.”
That conflicted with accounts from advocates across the nation, who reported little to no unusual activity. ICE agents periodically perform what the agency terms “targeted enforcement” by arriving at homes and detaining immigrants for deportation, but few of these actions appeared to play out this week.
Still, the threat of a raid scared many immigrants into staying home and missing work, and Hispanic businesses and churches reported a drop in activity.
Hundreds called into an immigrant rights hotline (1-833-HOUIMMI) staffed by volunteers from area nonprofits as part of the Houston Immigration Legal Services Collaborative. The collaborative said it had confirmed only the arrest of one person at El Paraiso Apartments as of Thursday, and four locations where ICE was present. It said many immigrants at those locations reported that they followed advocates’ advice and did not allow ICE into their apartments or homes if they did not present a warrant.
“While we haven’t seen the ‘mass raids’ that the administration threatened, deportations happen every day in Houston,” Andrea Guttin, legal director of the collaborative, said in a statement.
She said immigration agents removed about 15,900 people from the Houston region in fiscal 2018, one of the highest rates in the nation, but area nonprofits have a limited capacity to do deportation defense work without charging a fee.
She urged residents to ask city and county leaders to contribute to local deportation funds.
Cities from Los Angeles to New York and even San Antonio and Austin designate taxpayer money for deportation defense. Houston is the largest city that does not.