Roy Morales said he thinks he has found a winning issue in his campaign to secure a seat on Houston City Council.
In local races often consumed by neighborhood battles over roads, parks and bike lanes, he’s offering something totally different — a get-tough policy on local immigrants.
“We are going to stop them, we are going to put them in jail,” Morales told a Harris County group in September. “We are going to go after them in Kingwood. We’re going to go after them in Clear Lake, the West Side, Denver Harbor, Second Ward, First Ward, the whole city.”
A hallmark of this campaign is Morales’ pledge to get the city to rejoin a federal program targeting immigrants without legal status. The program, U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s 287(g), can be carried out two different ways. One trains members of local law enforcement to serve and execute warrants on immigrants without proper documentation in their agency’s jail, and another model gives jails the opportunity to seek out immigrants without documentation who have been arrested by local law enforcement agencies.
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