San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones said on Friday, November 6, that she will ask City Manager Erik Walsh to explore options for ending the San Antonio Police Department's cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in comments to the San Antonio Current that make San Antonio the latest large Texas city moving to redraw its local role in federal immigration enforcement after Tuesday's elections.

Source: San Antonio Current

The step is, at this stage, a request to explore options — not a signed order and not yet a change in what San Antonio officers do on the street. Jones has not announced a new SAPD policy, a date for one, or which forms of cooperation would end. That distinction matters: Houston's mayor signed an executive order on the same day, while San Antonio's mayor has asked her city manager to work out what ending cooperation would involve.

Source: San Antonio Current

The mayor's reason: police should be police, not immigration agents

Jones tied the move directly to public safety and trust. She told the Current it is important to make sure officers are focused on their mission of keeping the city safe, and not taking on other responsibilities they are not trained for — responsibilities that, in her words, actually make the community less safe when people are afraid to call the police. That fear argument is the core of the case city leaders in Texas are now making: if immigrant residents avoid calling 911, reporting crime or cooperating as witnesses because a routine call could lead to immigration enforcement, local policing itself gets harder.

A second report on the Texas mayors' moves, published Saturday, November 7, carried the same Jones statement and placed San Antonio alongside Austin and Houston as the three major Texas cities answering calls from Democratic voters to end or limit local police cooperation with ICE after their party's results on Tuesday night.

Source: Lone Star Pioneer, on the Texas mayors' ICE moves

What changed in Texas this week

Jones's comments came hours after Houston Mayor John Whitmire signed an executive order calling on Houston police to contact ICE only if a person is arrested for a jailable offence and also has an administrative immigration warrant — the order that Awaaz Punjab reported as Houston's break with routine ICE notification during traffic stops and minor encounters. Both moves followed Governor Greg Abbott's defeat in Tuesday's election. Through an array of executive actions, Abbott had required local law enforcement agencies to cooperate with federal immigration authorities and notify ICE whenever officers encountered undocumented immigrants, the Current reported.

The incoming state leadership has not yet said how it will handle those Abbott-era requirements. On Thursday, staff for Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa told the Current they did not yet have a policy or statement on how she plans to address Abbott's executive orders on ICE cooperation and his Operation Lone Star border crackdown. Whitmire and Jones, the Current noted, are not waiting for that answer. Any San Antonio change will also have to be tested against Texas law, including the state's 2017 Senate Bill 4 framework on local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, which Houston's debate has again put at the centre of the argument.

Part of a wider reset Jones is seeking after the election

ICE cooperation is not the only file Jones reopened this week. On Thursday she sent her City Council colleagues a memo requesting ideas on how to amend the city's lobbying priorities ahead of the Texas Legislature's next session, which begins in January. On October 30, council had approved a list of priorities for city staff to lobby for in Austin, including preventing the breakup of CPS Energy, funding for Project Marvel, flood protection projects and the South Texas Parkway transportation initiative. With Abbott leaving office, Jones suggested, lobbying to protect the city-owned CPS Energy utility may no longer be necessary, since the governor had wanted to break it up over its status as a city-owned monopoly.

Her top stated priority is expanding Medicaid access for San Antonio residents. Texas, she told the Current, has the most uninsured people in the country, and expanding access would help about a million people get healthcare overnight. The Current also reported that Texas had a backlog of 238,000 Medicaid applications as of September, up sharply from a 1,600-case backlog at the start of this year. Jones's other priorities include repealing Abbott's so-called 'Death Star' law, which hinders Texas cities' ability to govern themselves, and removing barriers to reproductive health care and voting rights. She said she wants residents to call their district council offices with ideas, and hopes council will take action at its December 3 A Session, if not sooner.

Why this matters beyond San Antonio, and what happens next

For immigrant communities across Texas — including Punjabi diaspora families in the Houston, Dallas and San Antonio corridors who work, drive and run businesses in the state — the practical question in every city is the same one Jones raised: whether a traffic stop, a crime report or a call for help can turn into an immigration encounter with local police. San Antonio's answer is not final, but the direction is now set by its mayor. The next steps to watch are City Manager Erik Walsh's options paper, any council debate or vote, the response from state officials who backed Abbott's cooperation requirements, and Governor-elect Hinojosa's first stated position on those executive orders and on Operation Lone Star when she takes office in January. Awaaz Punjab will update this story when San Antonio moves from exploring an end to SAPD-ICE cooperation to adopting, or rejecting, a specific policy.