Earlier this month, Luis Morales Pérez and his wife Karina packed their bags for a trip to New York to visit their daughter. They didn’t make it out of the airport.
Pérez, an immigrant from Venezuela, was approached by ICE agents at George Bush Intercontinental Airport who claimed he’d overstayed his visa. The 50-year-old isn’t a criminal. He’s a pastor who oversees four Seventh-Day Adventist churches in Houston.
And he remains in an ICE detention facility in Livingston, where he’s been since August 6.
Pérez’s capture occurred about a month after a Mexican immigrant, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Houston’s East End/Magnolia Park neighborhood. Dozens of protests have been held since then and Houstonians have demanded that the federal immigration agency be abolished or at least leave Houston. The incident has received national publicity, and none of it has been positive.
One might think that, since Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the subject of two separate independent investigations — by Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare and the Texas Rangers — related to Araujo’s death, the federal government would scale things down a notch.
Instead, airport arrests have escalated, and last week, a Houston man with no criminal record was taken into ICE custody for reporting a convicted felon who was firing gunshots in a Home Depot parking lot.
“Whatever the stated reason for ICE’s tactics over the last two years to reduce crime or whatever it is, it is having a 180-degree opposite effect in Harris County,” Teare said at a July 13 press conference. “We are not able to hold violent criminals accountable because of the tactics of ICE. Full stop. And if you look across the board, the undocumented population in this country commits crimes at a lower rate than any other population. They’re scared to get speeding tickets.”
According to the National Immigration Law Center, TSA sends ICE weekly manifests of people flying through U.S. airports. These lists include names, photos and other details. “ICE checks these lists against its own records,” states a July 29 article published by the Los Angeles-based law center. “If ICE finds someone they want to target, they can send officers to arrest that person at the airport.”
Because TSA and ICE are both under the Department of Homeland Security umbrella, the rules government agencies have about sharing private information don’t apply, the article states. Houston-based civil rights attorney Randall Kallinen says that just because two federal entities are able to share travelers’ personal information doesn’t make it right or even legal.
“You’re telling people where someone is coming from and where they’re going, which is a personal privacy issue and can also be a security risk,” he says.
Pérez was admitted into the U.S. from Venezuela in 2020 and was granted Temporary Protected Status in 2023, but the Department of Homeland Security terminated the TPS designation for Venezuelan nationals last year.
“Temporary Protected Status is exactly that — temporary,” a statement from ICE reads. “For too long, TPS has been allowed to function as a de facto amnesty program despite Congress never intending it to be permanent.”
The August 6 incident at IAH wasn’t isolated.
Eighteen-year-old Alim Garipov, who was captain of the swim team at Bellaire High School last year and known to be a high achiever in the International Baccalaureate program, was taken into custody by ICE agents on July 17 while passing through William L. Hobby Airport with his parents and sister, on his way to visit colleges on the East Coast.
Garipov, who moved with his family to the United States from Russia in 2022, was accused of overstaying a visa even though he has a pending asylum case. He was detained for three days at a detention center in Conroe and released.
Kallinen says he doesn’t know why Garipov’s parents weren’t detained during the interaction at the airport. Maybe the teen missed a court date or his parents had work visas, Kallinen speculated, clarifying there’s been no publicly available evidence to suggest that Garipov did anything wrong. Kallinen says that since federal agents haven’t defended their decision to detain Garipov by offering a good reason for doing so, there probably wasn’t one.
Garipov’s attorney, Olsa Alikaj-Cano, did not respond to requests for comment last week. U.S. Congresswoman Lizzie Fletcher said in a statement after the Bellaire student’s release that he hadn’t crossed any international borders nor had he committed a crime.
“He is an extraordinary young man with a bright future ahead of him,” Fletcher said. “He loves his family and this country, and he has done everything the right way, legally, throughout this process.”
Hobby and George Bush Intercontinental Airport are owned by the City of Houston and managed by Houston Airport Systems, but the federal agencies outrank the local employees and can basically do what they want, Kallinen says.
The Trump administration dispatched ICE agents to Houston airports in March during a partial government shutdown, claiming they were there to assist understaffed TSA agents and not to arrest people. The airport arrests appear to have ramped up over the summer months since Araujo was killed.
In late July, Houston businessman John Gannon told KHOU that his fiancée, Venezuelan immigrant Yasmin Suarez Reyes, was arrested by ICE agents at IAH. Officers claimed she’d overstayed a visa that expired in 2024. Gannon told the news station he’d been a lifelong Republican and voted for President Donald Trump but was rethinking his support after he witnessed federal agents “picking up law-abiding citizens and destroying families.”
The incidents underscore the sentiment that many in Houston’s immigrant communities have been repeating for months: “If they’re coming for one of us, they’re coming for all of us.”
Trump’s immigration policy was once advertised as an effort to capture “the worst of the worst.” But that’s clearly not what’s happening, says Rehan Alimohammad, a partner with a Sugar Land-based immigration law firm and president of the Katy Bar Association. At least 70 percent of the population in ICE detention facilities nationwide has never been convicted of a crime, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
“That was just talk,” Alimohammad says of Trump’s promises to only deport violent criminals and border crossers. “It’s like they’re putting their hands in the cookie jar and grabbing whatever they can grab. Their goal is to increase their numbers. They had a record high number of detentions last month, and they’re going to continue that. I don’t think a de-escalation is going to happen.”
“Their policy remains that whoever they find — regardless of whether they have [an asylum] case pending — if they are not a citizen or a green card holder, they will detain them and let them worry about how to get out,” he added.
Alimohammad represents mostly South Asian immigrants and says he’s “pretty busy,” noting that this is not just a Latino problem. NBC News reported earlier this month that ICE is making 20 to 40 airport arrests per day nationwide, compared with fewer than 10 per day in May 2025.
The National Immigration Law Center says non-citizens should consider the risks of flying, including on domestic flights within the United States, before booking a trip. Kallinen says he advises his clients to only go to the airport if they have to.
“Now that there’s more danger in traveling, I guess it would all depend upon the severity of the reason for your travel if you want to risk it or not,” he says. “If you need to go to The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York for a special procedure, you might go ahead and do that. If you just want to go check out the Grand Canyon or take in a Broadway show, you might want to hold off.”
Distrust and Fear
Why would ICE make arrests in a public airport or on a traffic stop in a residential neighborhood when they could just go to a person’s house or demand they show up for a routine check-in appointment?
Alimohammad says the federal agents appear to revel in the spectacle of it all.
“They make arrests in airports because they can,” he says. “It’s helping increase their numbers. It gives them another venue to catch people. These videos go viral and these masked people come out in force. They don’t mind the videos. They don’t mind the publicity. They want people to be scared, and maybe they’ll leave. But how can they leave if they can’t go to the airport?”
The fear surrounding public safety in the immigrant communities extends beyond aviation hubs.
Sergio Lira, president of Greater Houston LULAC, told the Houston Press that his wife holds weekly meetings at her home to pray and visit with immigrant women. When the gatherings grew to a large number of people, one member suggested they use a meeting room at a public facility. The participants tried that once but didn’t get out of their vehicles when they saw a security guard stationed outside.
“That totally traumatized all of them,” Lira says. “It broke my heart. First it was fear, but now with what ICE is doing, it’s emotional trauma.”
The immigrant-led civil rights group FIEL Houston created a “Shopper Adopter” program through which volunteers buy and deliver groceries to families that are afraid to leave their homes.
Alimohammad, who also works as a professor at the University of Houston Law Center’s Immigration Clinic, says he tells his friends and clients not to put themselves in situations where they could be detained. The lawyer, who was born and raised in Texas, says he hasn’t personally been racially profiled, but he’s considered carrying his passport with him at all times.
“You’ve got to live your life,” he says. “I’m not going to tell people to stay home when they have to work and they have to eat. I tell them, don’t put yourself in a vulnerable spot where ICE is going to be. For example, I had a guy who has a case pending and he decided he was going to drive to the beach. He came across [U.S. Customs and Border Protection] and now he’s in detention. He has a legit case for asylum but it takes time. The government is not incentivized to speed up cases.”
To those who say that immigrants like Araujo, Pérez, Galipov and Reyes “should have just gotten their papers,” Alimohammad says there’s no simple process for doing that. It’s expensive and can take years to complete. Some people have to leave the country and then try to come back, which isn’t a viable option for those who don’t want to leave behind their families.
“There are millions of people here who have no avenue to get legal papers. The system is broken,” he says.
Kallinen says the presence of federal agents in Houston is concerning for several reasons. One is that the agents often drive unmarked vehicles and wear masks, so the people they’re targeting don’t know who they are.
In the case of the traffic stop that led to Araujo’s death, ICE agents said the 52-year-old man was uncooperative. But critics have pointed out: why would he pull over when he didn’t know who was in the car behind him?
“Who else might pursue cars? Cartels might pursue cars. Carjackers might pursue cars,” Kallinen says. “It’s not unheard of. That isn’t a fairy tale.”
On July 9, Juan Francisco Monroy Turuy, a Guatemalan citizen, reported to HPD that a man was firing gunshots in the parking lot of a Home Depot on Bellaire Boulevard. While HPD was conducting an investigation at the crime scene, Turuy was taken into ICE custody and remains at the processing center in Conroe.
The man who was allegedly firing a pistol, David Elias Mendez, was taken to the Harris County Jail and charged with unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon. The incident prompted many to question how ICE got involved. FIEL Houston held a press conference Friday at a different Home Depot location, accusing the retailer of “partnering” with ICE.
Kallinen says he, too, is suspicious about how ICE knew that the man who reported the Home Depot incident was undocumented.
“They must have been told by HPD,” he said. “When you talk to a witness, you get their information. There’s no other way. ICE didn’t know his name previously. This has always been a problem that activists have brought up for many years.”
Alimohammad says he’s not going to suggest that people refrain from reporting crimes. “What kind of society would we be in? Criminals will see that they’re not going to be reported so they can do whatever they want. They’re probably already seeing that,” he says.
Kallinen says he plans to attend the August 18 city council meeting to suggest that a policy be adopted so U visas, designated for crime victims and witnesses, can be secured immediately to prevent people who could offer key testimony from being detained or deported while an investigation is ongoing.
Three members of Araujo’s work crew witnessed the shooting on July 7 and were immediately taken to the ICE detention facility in Conroe. One was released late last month but the other two remain in custody, although Teare and their attorneys have filed for U visas on their behalf.
Alimohammad says that U visas can take up to four years to secure. “The federal government has reversed its policy that they would not detain or remove these people,” he says. “There’s a lot of pressure on judges to move cases faster, and they’re not waiting.”
HPD and ICE Collaboration
Kallinen recently sued HPD on behalf of his client, Erick Lopez, who was held by local police for two hours on a traffic stop while the officers waited for ICE. He’s requesting a class action suit so that others can join the filing and a precedent can be set to protect people in the future.
“You can’t hold him there longer than the purpose for the stop,” Kallinen says. “That’s a Fourth Amendment violation of an unreasonable search and seizure. Sometimes ICE gets there and doesn’t even want them. The problem is that HPD shouldn’t be holding someone for two hours over a traffic violation. Just write them a ticket.”
“They say they have an administrative warrant because that gives them more power, but they’re not really warrants that a judge has signed,” he added. “You can call macaroni caviar, and try to charge more money, but that doesn’t make it caviar.”
The matter of the lengthy HPD detention periods, considered by some to be doing ICE’s job for them, would have been resolved by an ordinance proposed earlier this year by Council Member Alejandra Salinas. The policy dictated that officers could not detain people after a traffic stop concludes for the sole purpose of waiting for ICE to arrive. The ordinance passed 12-5 on April 8 but was amended a week later when Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to withdraw $114 million in public safety funds.
Salinas has said she’ll bring back the ordinance “in a heartbeat” if she has the support of a majority of council members. She’ll likely have the support of newly elected Councilman Joe Panzarella, who told the Press, “We don’t want ICE in Houston. We don’t want ICE to be murdering people.”
Panzarella says he purposely refers to Araujo’s death as a murder even though the investigation isn’t complete, “because this was an individual who was robbed of due process.”
“We’ve seen ICE murder folks all throughout the nation, and protesters have come to say that they warned us that this would happen,” he says. “Unfortunately, I am not surprised that this happened in Houston. If you have an organization that doesn’t wear a badge, doesn’t wear a body cam, doesn’t really have oversight from local authorities or the state government, then they kind of feel empowered to do whatever they want to do, and we continue to see that, unfortunately.”
Both he and Salinas say they’d like to see HPD only doing the bare minimum when it comes to cooperating with ICE. “I’d like to see more of a culture within HPD that does more to protect Houstonians, citizen or not,” Panzarella says.
Alimohammad says that when a person is approached by an ICE agent, they can defer to an attorney, but immigration cases are civil matters and their rights are not the same as they would be in a criminal case.
“You say, ‘Can I call the police?’ And they say, ‘We are the police.’ They’ll just grab you and put you in a van,” he says. “It’s very difficult to do when you’re in that position, so the best thing to do is not be in that position.”
The attorney added that he’s not surprised that the Trump administration’s approach to immigration policy has escalated in the President’s second term. “The rhetoric was there and he had four years to figure out what he was going to do differently this time. I don’t see it going down and I’m definitely not surprised.”
Salinas says she hopes Houstonians will show up to the city council’s Public Safety Committee meeting on August 25 to hear directly from HPD about its interactions with ICE. In addition to the mounting data on detentions and deportations, Houston police calls to ICE have doubled in recent months.
“I’m demanding that the chief of police come to City Hall and explain to the public why we are seeing the numbers that we’re seeing,” Salinas says. “As you may recall, when our ordinance was amended, we heard lots of assurances from the mayor and the city attorney that nothing would change and everything would remain the same as it was under the original ordinance.”
But that’s not what the data shows, Salinas says. “It is unacceptable to say in one breath that ICE is an out-of-control organization, and for the same person to say that we can’t do anything, and it’s perfectly reasonable for HPD to be holding people for nearly two hours to hand someone over to an out-of-control organization.”
“Unfortunately, under the current state law, we cannot prohibit or ban ICE from being in Houston, but it is also incumbent on us to change what we can control, and that starts with changing HPD’s cooperation with ICE.”
To the Houstonians like the pastor, the swim team captain and the family of a man who was slain while driving to work on a construction job — and the thousands of others who don’t feel safe in a community that once prided itself on cultural diversity and inclusion — Salinas offers an apology.
“I mean, we’re now seeing reports of people trying to get on airplanes being detained by ICE. It seems that there is no limit to the terror that this organization is intending to implement in this country,” she says. “All I can say to those people is that I am so sorry that this country is letting you down, and that I and others are going to continue fighting until a change occurs.”
