Senate Bill 8 will give deputies some authority that ICE already has.
AUSTIN, Texas — A new bill that will soon be signed into law by Governor Greg Abbott will require sheriff’s offices across Texas to enter into agreements with ICE.
234 of 254 offices will be required to comply.
“We really had no federal authority to… our authorities under, under immigration have been very limited as local authorities,” Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar said.
That will change. Senate Bill 8 will give deputies some authority that ICE already has. While Sheriff Salazar is not sure the full extent of the impacts to Bexar County, he does believe it’ll have a direct effect on jail operations.
“Certain deputies from within the Bexar County Jail will have the authority to initiate, and the expectation is that they will initiate those documents,” he said. “So, in the future, it may not just be immigration authorities, asking for those detainers. It may actually be a Bexar County deputy.”
A detainer currently allows ICE to detain and question those who are undocumented that come through the jail about more than what they came into the jail for.
The sheriff explains that deputies will only have the authority to issue a detainer once they go through a training, though Salazar has some concerns.
“You’re taking a young deputy and you’re taking ten weeks of information, cramming it into seven weeks and hoping they get it right every single time,” Sheriff Salazar said. “Unfortunately, I believe that again, we talked about human error at a certain point. That young deputy that’s only got seven weeks worth of training might make a mistake, and that those mistakes may lead to civil litigation or, you know, any number of things that could go wrong.”
Complying with the bill is mandatory, but the sheriff believes this bill will incur costs for the county, including overtime.
“If I send you away for seven weeks to go learn this stuff, now, I’ve got to pay somebody overtime to do your job for those seven week,” Sheriff Salazar stated. “So there is going to be an expense attached to it. I don’t know how we’re going to go about funding it.”
The bill is currently sitting on the governor’s desk to be signed into law. Once it is, sheriff’s offices will have a deadline of December 2026 to enter into agreements with ICE.