Incumbent Sally Hernandez has a sizable lead in the Travis County sheriff’s Democratic primary, according to incomplete voting totals Tuesday evening.
Hernandez received 84,812 votes — 78.27% of votes cast — according to the data available so far. Candidate Liz Donegan is in second place, with 15,693 votes, or 14.48%. Candidate John Loughran has received 7,848 votes, or 7.24% of the vote.
If elected, Hernandez said she plans to continue strengthening her office’s partnerships with agencies such as the National Alliance on Mental Illness. She also supports Travis County’s plan to build a new women’s jail, while Donegan and Loughran do not.
Hernandez was first elected sheriff in 2016, running on a pledge to evaluate federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement requests to detain inmates suspected of being undocumented, rather than continuing the jail’s policy of automatically honoring the requests.
As a result, Gov. Greg Abbott temporarily cut some state grant money to Travis County in 2017, then made the issue a top legislative priority. He signed a bill into law that year that required Texas sheriffs to comply with all ICE detainer requests, so Travis County has now reverted to its original policy.
“We fought a good fight,” Hernandez told the American-Statesman this year. “I think when we put our policy in place, we proved a lot of things. We really proved that ICE detainers are a request; they’re not warrants based on probable cause and signed by a magistrate.”
The winner will face Republican sheriff candidate Raul Vargas, who is running unopposed in the Republican primary, in the November election.
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