Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Thursday announced that he is opening an investigation into the City of Dallas for potentially violating a ban on immigration sanctuary cities in Texas.
Dallas police officers and community members are anxious over the Trump administration’s pledge to ramp up federal deportations less than two months into his second term. Local cops are worried it will make the public afraid to seek help from law enforcement when they need it. Residents are worried that they could be targeted in raids, even if they have legal status.
During community meetings last month, DPD officers joined with Michael Igo, the interim chief of the department, to explain that it “is not assisting any federal agency on somehow detaining people that are either documented or undocumented in the City of Dallas.”
Conservative media seized on the declaration. Libs of TikTok, a conservative page on X, posted his headshot with a statement that “impeding [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] can result in legal action.”
And Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham criticized the comments on her show, The Ingraham Angle, calling Igo “a complete nightmare,” according to the Dallas Morning News. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who joined her show as a guest, alleged that Igo said he would “openly defy federal immigration law.”
In a later press conference, Igo clarified that the Texas and federal agencies have not asked the police department to participate in immigration enforcement efforts. The department “continues to fulfill all of its duties and obligations to enforce state and local laws — while protecting the constitutional rights of all people.”
He explained that the department’s general order on immigration remains in effect: Dallas officers “will not, and I quote from our general order, ‘stop or contact any person for the sole purpose of determining immigration status,’” per the Dallas Express News.
But those attitudes could run into trouble with a Texas law from Donald Trump’s first year as president.
In 2017, Gov. Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 4 into law, prohibiting local officials, including police, from refusing to work with the federal government to enforce immigration laws. The bill aimed to effectively ban “sanctuary cities” for undocumented migrants, just as Trump took office campaigning to build a border wall and deport migrants on a mass scale.
That’s the basis for Paxton’s investigation into what his office called Dallas’s “Open Borders Sanctuary City Policies.”
“Our office is concerned that Chief Igo’s statement may reflect a policy of the City of Dallas or the Dallas Police Department to not comply with state law,” Paxton’s letter explained.
Paxton’s announcement just after noon indicated that he also has issued a formal request for records from the department — “all policies, training materials, and communications related to Dallas’s enforcement or non-enforcement of immigration laws, including any records reflecting decisions to decline cooperation with federal immigration authorities,” according to the press release.
Letter-to-City-of-Dallas-on-Sanctuary-Policies
