A Honduran citizen who was deported following a Houston traffic stop has filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against the City of Houston, alleging police officers unlawfully extended his detention so federal immigration agents could take him into custody.
According to the lawsuit, Erick Ruiz Lopez, 29, was pulled over for a traffic violation on June 17. Lopez had no criminal warrants and no criminal record, but alleges that police held him for more than two hours after the stop while they waited for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to arrive. He was deported to Honduras on June 27.
“Erick has no criminal record,” said Lopez’s attorney, Randall Kallinen, in a press release. “He was supporting a girlfriend with two children, doing tile and other flooring work.”
The lawsuit claims Houston police violated Lopez’s constitutional rights by prolonging the traffic stop solely to give ICE time to take him into custody. It alleges the city has a policy or practice of unlawfully extending stops for people with civil immigration warrants, even though those warrants are not criminal documents and do not by themselves give local police authority to detain someone. Roughly 700,000 civil immigration warrants were added to a federal database last year under the Trump administration.
Lopez is seeking unspecified damages and a court order barring Houston police from continuing the alleged practice. The suit also seeks class-action status on behalf of others who may have been similarly detained. As of Tuesday morning, the City of Houston had not responded to the lawsuit.
The case lands in the middle of a monthslong fight over how Houston police handle encounters with aliens who have civil immigration warrants. Houston City Council voted 12-5 on April 8 to approve an ordinance ending a prior requirement that Houston police officers hold individuals for up to 30 minutes to give ICE agents time to respond to a scene. Under that ordinance, a stop was supposed to end once the original reason for the stop was resolved, and the policy added a quarterly public reporting requirement for Houston Police Department on how often officers asked about immigration status or contacted federal authorities.
The ordinance did not last long.
Gov. Greg Abbott’s office notified Mayor John Whitmire that the state would withhold more than $110 million in public safety grant funding unless Houston reversed the policy, and Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit accusing the city of violating state law barring local governments from limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. Whitmire, who had voted for the original ordinance, reversed his position and pushed for changes.
On April 22, City Council voted 13-4 to approve an amended version of the ordinance negotiated between the mayor’s office and the governor’s Public Safety Office. City Attorney Arturo Michel said the amendment made no major changes to the original measure, though the revised language altered how ICE administrative warrants are defined and removed language stating those warrants do not establish probable cause.
Since then, HPD has operated under a policy allowing officers to wait a “reasonable” amount of time for ICE agents to arrive when they encounter someone with a civil immigration warrant, the same general approach the department followed for most of Trump’s second term.
Lopez’s traffic stop occurred nearly two months after the revised ordinance took effect, and his lawsuit is now positioned to test how Houston’s current policy holds up in court.
