It also follows the Dallas County jail recently deciding it would no longer honor all detainer requests from federal immigration agents in the nation’s seventh-largest lockup.
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Abbott cited the example of Kate Steinle who was murdered by an undocumented immigrant who was released because a sheriff decided not to honor ICE’s requests.
Local stories from the KERA Newsroom.
But outrage reignited nationally this summer after a woman was fatally shot in San Francisco by a Mexican national who had been released from jail despite a federal detainer request.
Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez received a rough start to her Monday morning after being served with a letter from Texas Governor Greg Abbott strongly encouraging her to honor federal immigration detainers.
But he said Valdez and her office do not always participate.
“Now more than ever”, Abbott concluded in his letter, “it is essential that state, federal, and local law enforcement work collaboratively to protect our fellow Texans and to ensure that our laws are upheld, not disregarded”.
Abbott, a Republican, didn’t weigh in publicly on the issue earlier this year as lawmakers considered policies to take on sanctuary cities.
She says Abbott plans to support anti-sanctuary city legislation during the 2017 legislative session.
San Francisco prides itself on being a so-called “sanctuary city” – one which protects undocumented immigrants from being deported and declines to cooperate with hold orders from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Abbott warned that the state is prepared to take several steps to punish cities and counties that declare themselves to be “Sanctuary Cities.’ Those steps include requiring local taxpayers to pick up 100% of the additional costs of health care and education provided to illegal immigrants who settle in the city due to its “sanctuary” policy, and allowing people who are victimized by illegal immigrants to sue cities and counties for monetary damages, on the grounds that their ‘Sanctuary City” policies are responsible for the crime.
The Dallas County policy change took effect on September 1 and is done on a case-by-case basis.
Further, the policy change isn’t written down, Sheriff Valdez said in a previous interview with The Dallas Morning News.
During the fiscal year of 2015, there were 2,048 hold requests; there were no statistics available on how many of those requests were rejected.
“Valdez, relying on her and her officers’ law enforcement experience and research that shows that cooperation with immigration enforcement erodes the trust of the community, made the best choice for her department and for her county”, Brown said.
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Officials there have “long recognized that they do not have the resources, the prosecutors, the immigration courts, the space in detention centers to detain and place in deportation proceedings every illegal immigrant arrested for speeding, driving without a seat belt, or changing lanes without using a turn signal”, Dubove said.
