Although Central Texas has not been subjected to the numbers of immigration raids and sweeps by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that have been seen along the border with Mexico, or the National Guard deployments to support ICE operations in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland, Texas leads the nation in arrests this year.
The Texas Tribune reported in mid-September that Texas Department of Public Safety officers have helped arrest more than 3,000 undocumented immigrants across the state this year at the direction of Governor Greg Abbott. “Among them was a Honduran man in Austin who was riding in the passenger seat of a car stopped for an expired registration after DPS apparently staked out his home,” the story stated. In addition, authorities raided a party in Hays County and arrested almost four dozen people, including children.
According to a CBS analysis in July, of the 109,000 arrests over the previous five months, nearly one-quarter occurred in Texas. The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a data gathering, research and distribution organization based at Syracuse University, lists the number of detainees in Texas in 2025 at 13,415 through September 15th, which is almost twice as many as Louisiana and nearly four times as many as California. TLAC data also notes that 70.3 percent of those detainees had no criminal convictions; instead their offenses were minor infractions such as traffic violations.
Law enforcement officials in Travis County have been vocal and public about their positions. While Travis County Sheriff Sally Hernandez has stated she does not favor turning over undocumented detainees to federal agents, Austin Police Chief Lisa Davis went a step further stating in an interview with KUT in late-January, “It is not the function of the local police department, and my function is to keep Austin safe. So that, to me, means it’s a sanctuary city.” In a separate interview, Hernandez told KUT that an increased presence of ICE enforcement makes her job more difficult, as people pull back from police and emergency services. “We want victims to run to our agency in a crisis, not run away.”
New law requires sheriffs to aid ICE
On June 20th, Governor Abbott signed Senate Bill 8 (SB 8) into law. The new legislation requires counties to participate with ICE by assigning certain federal immigration functions to local and state officers. Specifically, it requires sheriffs in 43 counties with populations of more than 100,000 to enter into 287(g) agreements with ICE. This refers to a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows the Department of Homeland Security to facilitate formal agreements between ICE and state and local law enforcement agencies. The federal government provides funding to train and authorize local officers to perform immigration enforcement functions—essentially deputizing them as ICE agents…