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With Abbott feud past, Hernandez eyes new goals in 2nd term – News – Austin American-Statesman

February 7, 2020
in Local
4 min read
With Abbott feud past, Hernandez eyes new goals in 2nd term – News – Austin American-Statesman

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After serving a first term that began with a high-profile immigration dispute with Texas governor, Travis County Sheriff Sally Hernandez says she is seeking reelection to continue other initiatives that are important to her.

“I love being the sheriff because of this community,” she said. “I have the opportunity to work with so many good people on so many important issues, like mental health and community trust. It’s been such an honor and a pleasure, and I want to do it for four more years.”

Since her election as sheriff in 2016, Hernandez has implemented programs to address mental health issues within the sheriff’s office and in Travis County. She partners with the National Alliance on Mental Illness to train jail employees, and her office provides crisis courses for friends and family of people with mental illnesses.

“We have to find alternatives other than incarceration for people with mental illness,” Hernandez said. “I remember thinking, ‘How in the world can one sheriff do this?’”

She said it didn’t take long to realize that one sheriff can’t do it.

“We need everybody working together — finding systems, policies and practices,” she said. “We have to work on mental health issues at a local level, and we need to work together to take it even to the (Texas) Capitol.”

Hernandez said she also wants to continue strengthening the partnerships she has built with immigrant communities, the NAACP and local agencies that provide mental health care, among others.

The Democratic and Republican primary elections are March 3, and early voting begins Feb. 18. Two Democratic candidates are challenging her: Liz Donegan and John Loughran. Candidate Raul Vargas is running unopposed in the Republican primary. Jason Ryan Salazar is running as an Independent, and his name will appear on the November ballot.

Hernandez said another major priority in a second term would be overseeing plans for a new women’s jail. The two Democratic candidates challenging her for her seat — Liz Donegan and John Loughran — have said they support renovations but oppose building a new jail.

Travis County is moving forward with plans to design a $79 million women’s jail, despite a decline in the jail’s population as a result of pretrial diversion programs. Women currently are housed in three separate buildings in the 30-year-old jail on Bill Price Road in Del Valle, Hernandez said, and it’s often uncomfortable for them to walk through male facilities to go to medical appointments and programs.

OB-GYN services need to be brought on-site and mental health resources are lacking, Hernandez said, and the centralized location of classrooms affects women’s participation in programs.

But many criminal justice advocates have urged the county to spend that money elsewhere.

“It doesn’t make sense for them to continue to grow,” said Cate Graziani, a former criminal justice campaign coordinator for the nonprofit Grassroots Leadership and now policy director for the Texas Harm Reduction Alliance.

She worries that a long-term investment like the jail will make it harder over time for the county to redirect resources.

“We would really encourage the county to pump the brakes, look at the data, talk to the community and figure out a new way to spend the funds,” Graziani said.

Hernandez asserted that the county can continue to focus on its diversion programs while still investing in a new jail.

“For years, corrections was all about punishment, and buildings were built for men in mind,” Hernandez said. “I think when people talk about the difference between diversion and this new facility, they’re making it an ‘or’ and not an ‘and.’ We need both. We need diversion, and we need a facility. … We’re always going to have people coming into our facility; we’ve got to be able to take care of them.”

In 2016, a key element of Hernandez’s platform — as well as the other Democratic sheriff candidates’ platforms at the time — was a pledge to evaluate federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement requests to detain inmates suspected of being undocumented immigrants, rather than continuing the jail’s policy of automatically honoring the requests.

Gov. Greg Abbott was opposed to this campaign promise. He had already expressed his aversion for the policy when Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez enacted a similar practice, and in 2015 he warned that he would deny some grant funding to sheriffs’ offices that didn’t fully comply with all federal requests to detain undocumented immigrants who were booked into jails.

Abbott made good on his threat and 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 said. “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.”

Hernandez defended the policy at the time, arguing that unfettered detention requests would erode any trust between law enforcement and the immigrant community and potentially make it harder for immigrants to report crimes.

“When you require immigration (authorities) to bring in a warrant, they can and they do,” she said. “More than anything else, we proved here in Travis County that we care about the safety of our immigrant community a lot more than we care about their status, and that’s a community value that’s worth fighting for.”

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