Erick Lopez was torn away from his girlfriend, two kids and the life he built over 12 years in Houston when he was deported to Honduras in June.
"We video chat every night," Lopez toldHouston Public Mediathrough a translator. "Sometimes we spend two or three hours. Sometimes she gets home from work at 7 p.m., showers, makes dinner and then calls me around 8 p.m. We finish talking around 10 p.m., when she goes to sleep."
Lopez said he arrived in the U.S. at the age of 17 in 2014, fleeing from gang violence in Honduras. He met his novia — his girlfriend — at Scarborough High School in northwest Houston. He worked in construction, supporting her and two kids.
In Honduras, after more than a decade away, he said it's hard to find work.
"Back in Houston, I could at least say I had a stable job, my own car and my own things — my home, my car, my partner, my family. Here in Honduras, it's very hard to find work right now. There just aren’t any jobs," Lopez said. "The gang situation hasn’t changed. It's still a bit dangerous because of the gangs. So, if they see you have a little money or something, they start hassling you — trying to extort you, things like that. So, it's very different."
His return to Honduras started with a traffic stop.
Randall Kallinen, his attorney, said Houston police officers pulled Lopez over for allegedly rolling through a stop sign in June.
According to data from the Houston Police Department (HPD), he was detained for 1 hour and 47 minutes while officers searched his car and waited for federal immigration agents to respond to a civil immigration warrant.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security toldHouston Public MediaLopez was deported under a "final order of removal" issued by a judge in 2014.
Kallinen announced Lopez's lawsuit against HPD this month. He's seeking a federal court order prohibiting HPD from detaining people solely due to civil immigration warrants, as well as monetary damages.
Lopez is one of at least 19 people HPD handed over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from April through June, according to data from the department.
He said he misses his life in Houston. His girlfriend, the kids — and his freedom.
"After work, you can pursue your hobbies," Lopez said. "For me, honestly, playing soccer was something I loved doing — sharing that time with my friends or my family. Just that freedom."
HPD Chief Noe Diaz skips meeting
HPD officers called ICE about people with civil immigration warrants more than 100 times from April through June.
On Tuesday, HPD Chief Noe Diaz and executive chief Thomas Hardin were slated to present his first-ever quarterly report on the department's coordination with ICE to the city council's public safety committee — but they skipped the meeting. Assistant senior city attorney Melissa Azadeh said his absence was part of "strategic decisions made by the legal department that cannot be discussed in public session" due to the ongoing litigation. Azadeh instructed a lower-level HPD official not to answer questions about specific cases or policies."I think we can all agree that their refusal to be here is nothing short of cowardice," council member Alejandra Salinas said.
The quarterly updates are required under a reform package passed by the city council in April. The initial ordinance also prohibited officers from detaining people while waiting for ICE to respond to civil immigration warrants, but city officials walked back that measure after Texas Governor Greg Abbott threatened to revoke more than $110 million in public safety grants.
In at least 34 cases, officers detained people after someone called emergency responders for help. According to records obtained byHouston Public Media, one of those instances involved a woman who called 911 on April 21 to report a violent threat.
According to HPD, officers held people with immigration warrants for an average of 39 minutes from April through June.
Legal experts say administrative warrants represent ‘gray area'
Legal experts and city officials differ on whether officers can detain someone due to a civil immigration warrant.
"It’s a somewhat gray area," said University of Houston law professor Seth Chandler. "There is no exact case on this point ... The question is, can they continue to detain you for a little while while they wait for federal authorities to come and get you?"
The city of Houston's legal department toldHouston Public Mediaofficers can hold someone "for the time it takes to investigate a potential state law violation" — but not for a civil immigration warrant.
A detention by local law enforcement officers over an administrative warrant — a civil, non-criminal warrant issued by ICE itself — would violate the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures, city attorney Arturo Michel said in April.
But after Michel's comments in April, HPD issued a directive enabling officers to “wait a reasonable amount of time” for ICE to “obtain custody” of people with civil immigration warrants. Since then, officers have held people for as long as three and a half hours waiting for ICE.
"This is a highly contested area of law," said David Kwok, director of the Criminal Justice Institute at UH Law Center. "Because we have an administrative warrant in hand, that’s an untested area of law right now because that’s not a criminal matter."
If a decision is issued in Lopez's case, Chandler and Kwok said, it would be the first federal ruling on the matter.
Houston Public Media's Bianca Seward and Kyle McClenagan contributed reporting to this story.
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