It’s been just over a year since Waymo rolled out its partnership with Uber, and its presence has rapidly expanded across Austin. There are now about 300 of the sleek white vehicles with black spinning tops driving around city streets, a level of ubiquity the company asserts is improving safety for pedestrians and drivers.

Not everyone is sold. Some city leaders say the vehicles can, at times, hinder public safety. In the wake of several high-profile incidents over the past 12 months — including the recent death of a beloved duck, an incident in which a Waymo vehicle blocked an ambulance responding to the shooting at Buford’s Backyard Beer Garden and reports of autonomous vehicles unsafely passing school buses — skepticism is growing about whether the technology is ready for widespread use. City leaders also say the companies can be opaque about how their systems operate. The latest example: Waymo declined the city’s request to attend a Wednesday special meeting to discuss public safety.

“Thanks for printing out the ‘Reserved for Waymo’ signs,” Council Member Zo Qadri said, referencing empty chairs in front of the dais. “Waymo sadly did not show up.”

Despite growing skepticism at City Hall, local lawmakers have limited authority after Texas banned cities from regulating autonomous vehicles in 2017, leaving oversight largely in the hands of the state. However, additional oversight will come at the end of May, when a new state law goes into effect requiring companies to obtain Texas Department of Motor Vehicles authorization before operating commercially.

“No tech works perfectly, but we’ve managed to keep airline accidents down very low, and that’s because we’ve had a lot of time and experience to perfect, or nearly perfect the system,” said Missy Cummings, director of George Mason University’s Mason Autonomy & Robotics Center, a research hub on autonomous systems. “We’re still years, if not decades, away from something similar to happen to self-driving cars.”

“Austin is being treated as a lab experiment that they didn’t sign up for,” Cummings said. “It’s just a matter of time until someone’s killed.”

How autonomous vehicles took hold in Austin

While the 2025 partnership with Uber accelerated Waymo’s expansion, the company has been rolling out vehicles in Austin since 2023. Waymo is now the dominant operator in the city, but at least five other companies also have vehicles on Austin streets, though not all companies are currently offering rides.

Autonomous vehicles’ introduction has not been without its setbacks. Cruise cars were once everywhere, but after many well-documented incidents, the company suspended its nationwide operations in October 2023 amid eroding public trust.

Despite lacking regulatory authority, the city launched an autonomous vehicle dashboard in 2023 to track incidents involving the vehicles and better understand emerging issues.

Reported incidents have steadily increased since 2023, likely driven in part by the growing number of vehicles on the road, with about 270 total since the dashboard’s launch. Reports include safety concerns, vehicles blocking traffic, failing to comply with police direction and ignoring school bus stop signs.

Waymo points to safety record

“We’ve driven over 200 million miles [across all cities],” David Margines, director of product management at Waymo, told Austin Current. “We have demonstrated a 92% reduction in serious injury collisions as compared to human drivers on the same roads and in the same geographies.”

In one of the most recent high-profile incidents, a Waymo vehicle blocked an ambulance responding to the March 1 shooting at Buford’s that left three people dead and more than a dozen injured. Public safety officials said the delay did not hurt emergency medical response, but the incident nonetheless raised significant safety concerns and prompted Austin City Council members to send a formal letter to the company seeking ways to prevent similar situations.

Margines called the event “anomalous,” and said the company reviews such incidents to prevent recurrence and maintain community trust.

“We recognize that we need to build and maintain the trust in the communities that we operate in,” Margines said. He added that after incidents like the ambulance case, the company evaluates whether “there are things that we can do better, whether we can operate faster and basically get out of the way of emergency vehicles.”

Margines said Waymo is among the safest and most transparent autonomous vehicle companies, saying the company is more forthcoming about collisions than its competitors.

“We are tremendously proud of our track record here in Texas,” Margines said. “When we look at the big picture, people’s lives are being improved because Waymo is out there on the road.”

Austin leaders push for safeguards

Austin City Council Member Paige Ellis, who chairs Austin’s Mobility Committee, said she wants to see more transparency from all autonomous vehicle companies. Public officials have recently criticized Waymo for not providing enough detail about who its remote assistance operators are, their level of training and where they are located.

“Personally, I would love to have more information about those questions,” Ellis told Austin Current. “We as government officials, we thrive on transparency… We need our information to be available to the public. We want people to have information and answers, and private companies don’t necessarily have that charge.”

At the Wednesday special meeting, public safety leaders outlined several issues first responders have encountered in recent months, including autonomous vehicles not responding to emergency workers’ hand signals, remaining on roadways during severe weather events, requiring manual relocation during active emergency scenes and situations in which intoxicated passengers fall asleep during rides and do not wake up.

“The question is not if this is going to turn into a deadly situation but when,” Ellis said at the meeting.

While Austin currently lacks the authority to regulate the vehicles, public safety officials questioned whether future policies might restrict operations during severe weather or allow the city to recoup costs when first responders are required to manually move vehicles blocking active scenes.

The city’s government relations department expressed support for future legislation aimed at strengthening safety requirements.

Austin should do “everything that we can to be a city that does welcome new technology,” Ellis said, “but, first and foremost, has to put our top priority as the life, health and safety of the folks in Austin, Texas.”

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The Austin Police Department (APD) on April 24 reached an agreement with Texas state authorities to release a stricter policy that would require local police to contact Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) when they encounter people with an ICE warrant out against them. The move comes months after community outrage following the January ICE arrest of Karen Guadalupe Gutiérrez Castellanos and her 5-year-old daughter Génesis Ester Gutiérrez Castellanos after Gutiérrez called Austin police for help dealing with a friend’s alleged abuser. When officers arrived, they reported Gutiérrez to ICE, leading to her deportation to Honduras along with her daughter, who is a U.S. citizen. 

In its initial response to the outrage the incident prompted, APD updated its guidance to officers on March 4 to soften its stance toward immigration enforcement. “The officer or the supervisor, as appropriate, may, but is not required to, contact the ICE Law Enforcement Service Center,” the policy said.

However, the state almost immediately pushed back, with Gov. Greg Abbott threatening to withhold $2.5 million in public safety grants if the city did not roll back these new limits on cooperation with ICE. In response to the threat, Austin police policy now mandates that if someone has an ICE warrant, officers and supervisors “should, when operationally feasible” contact ICE. 

The latest policy also states that if officers are unable to contact ICE at a scene, they must do so “as soon as possible.” It does add a caveat that “no more than a single attempt to contact ICE will be made and officers shall not unreasonably prolong a lawful detention to contact ICE.”

On Jan. 5, a friend who had suffered domestic violence visited Gutiérrez. When the person accused of the abuse also showed up at her home, Gutiérrez called APD. Police arrived and ran an identity check on Gutiérrez, confirming that she had an active ICE warrant since 2019, according to a memo that Police Chief Lisa Davis sent to Austin’s mayor and the City Council. 

As opposed to a formal detainer request, administrative warrants are routinely issued by federal agents—not a judge—to flag someone who may have violated civil immigration law. Still, APD alerted ICE, and immigration agents took custody of Gutiérrez and Génesis.

Gutiérrez’s story is not an anomaly. According to a Prism analysis of Austin police’s 2025 quarterly reports, APD contacted and assisted ICE 37 times last year—a significant jump from the last time APD published immigration enforcement reports, in 2021, when the department contacted ICE only four times the entire year.

Five of the 2025 cases led to an ICE arrest, while eight people were placed in Travis County Jail from where ICE is known to routinely arrest people. It is unclear if those eight people were later taken by ICE. Like Gutiérrez, some cases involved APD contacting ICE about people who had reached out to police for help.

Collaborations between the police and ICE create a serious trust deficit among community members who may not feel comfortable contacting police for help, said Sabina Hinz-Foley Trejo, an organizer with Austin-based Grassroots Leadership. 

“While cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, and LA get a lot of attention, because of these surges and federal enforcement sent in, here in Texas we have a built-in surge that includes local police authorities working in tandem with ICE,” Trejo said.

An APD spokesperson told Prism in an email that the department is “fully aware that our minority community under-reports crime already.” 

The spokesperson said that immigrants who are not in immediate danger may contact an alternative resource, the APD’s Victim Services Unit. In case of an emergency, they can call 911 and request that someone from the Victim Services Unit respond to the call with an officer. A Victim Services Unit spokesperson told Prism that it is an all-civilian unit. “We do not report any individuals to ICE, nor do we ask about immigration status,” they said. 

ICE did not respond to a query from Prism about its collaboration with local police.

The APD’s latest policy change came days after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton launched an investigation into Austin police’s coordination with ICE, and Abbott wrote a letter to Austin Mayor Kirk Watson threatening funding cuts.

After the policy was tweaked again, Abbot’s office praised the change. 

“Governor Abbott has been clear: cities in Texas must fully comply with state law and cooperate with federal immigration authorities to keep dangerous criminals off our streets,” said Abbott’s press secretary Andrew Mahaleris in a statement. “The Austin Police Department has updated its policies to ensure its personnel will cooperate with [the Department of Homeland Security]. The funding hold is now lifted, and the Governor expects full contract compliance moving forward.”

Davis, the police chief, said in a statement about the revised policy, “Allocating resources in a way that protects public safety is vitally important and these updated General Orders allow for that.”

Daniel Woodward, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, said the new policy is “worse than what it was by a great degree.”

“The governor used defunding the police as a threat in order to unjustly target immigrant communities. He is using the power of his money to make this happen,” Woodward said. “Austin caved to the governor’s threats when they could have gone to court challenging it. This was a moment to stand up to a bully and protect immigrant communities.”

Collaboration between Austin police and ICE

Federal agents upload immigration-related warrants to the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database, which any law enforcement agency across the country can access. Since early 2025, when President Donald Trump started his second term, hundreds of thousands of names have been added to the NCIC database.

Each of APD’s 2025 quarterly reports say that officers run checks on individuals through this database to determine “if any outstanding warrants exist.”

“Recently, these NCIC identification checks have resulted in a higher number of ICE administrative warrants brought to the attention of APD,” the reports say. 

The influx of ICE warrants is what led APD to “review our general orders,” the spokesperson told Prism.

“It also made us realize we needed to clearly define what a civil administrative warrant is and how they should be handled,” they added.

Austin police engaged with ICE over an individual’s immigration status 14 times in the first quarter of 2025, nine times in the second quarter, 10 times in the third quarter, and four times in fourth quarter. 

While some instances led to arrests, in other cases, ICE told APD that agents would contact the individuals at a later date or simply refused to show up. 

In a majority of these cases, APD initiated volunteering information to ICE, with ICE first requesting assistance only in three cases. Of the 37 total instances in which APD contacted ICE, 27 involved people who were Hispanic, seven who were white, one Black, one Middle Eastern, and one whose race was unidentified.

In some of these cases, APD informed ICE about individuals who reached out to them with a complaint or request for help, as in Gutiérrez’s case. For instance, in the first quarter, a complainant contacted Austin police stating that “he was being followed by individuals intending to cause harm.” APD’s report, which does not list exact dates of the incidents, states that the “complainant was unable to positively identify any of the suspects and kept changing his story.” The officers found an ICE warrant in the complainant’s name and informed federal agents.

In the third quarter, an individual contacted Emergency Medical Services (EMS) wanting to “speak with a doctor about his mental health.” EMS contacted Austin police for assistance. APD ran the caller’s name in the database and found an administrative ICE warrant. “Officers contacted ICE but no federal officials were available to make the scene,” the report states. EMS then transported the individual to a hospital. 

“In some situations, EMS may work alongside other public safety partners when necessary to ensure patient, provider, and scene safety. However, any law enforcement actions taken are outside of EMS’s authority or decision-making,” an Austin-Travis County EMS spokesperson said. “We are not a law enforcement agency, we do not enforce immigration laws, we do not report patients to immigration authorities, and we do not determine or verify warrant status of any kind.”

In a separate case in the second quarter, an individual asked police for assistance with a traffic citation. Officers told the person that they could run their name through the NCIC database “to determine if an outstanding warrant existed with regards to the traffic citation,” according to the report. In that process, they discovered an administrative ICE warrant. “The subject was detained, and ICE was contacted,” the report states. APD gave ICE the individual’s updated contact information before releasing them.

In multiple other cases, the “subject” reported to ICE was someone found with an incorrect license plate or cited for a traffic violation. In one case, in the second quarter of 2025, a vehicle was stopped because it was seen swerving along a service road. The police officer determined that the registered owner of the vehicle had an active immigration violation and “was a previously deported felon.” However, the person in the car was not the car owner, but her son, who did not have an ICE warrant. He was released from the scene. The APD report does not explicitly state whether ICE was contacted but includes this case among the 37 times it engaged with ICE last year.

In at least one case, in the third quarter, Austin police came across an individual and alerted ICE about them while investigating another unrelated case.

Austin police’s new policy

The APD’s general orders state that “all officers are expected to comply with, honor, and fulfill formal immigration detainer requests issued by ICE.” But no such order exists for administrative warrants. 

While a detainer is a formal request from federal authorities to hold someone in police custody for a suspected immigration violation, administrative warrants are issued by agents who suspect someone of violating civil immigration laws. An administrative warrant is not a criminal warrant. 

“An administrative warrant is created by ICE officers themselves and is supposed to be based on their probable cause that a person be removed from the country,” said Krystal Gómez, managing attorney at the Texas Immigration Law Council. “These warrants don’t go through a judge, no criminal judge reviews it, and so it holds less weight than a criminal warrant.”.

In 2017, the Texas Legislature passed Senate Bill 4, which prohibits cities from enacting, enforcing, or even advocating for policies and practices that would prohibit or limit the enforcement of immigration laws. Davis has referenced this clause to justify APD’s assistance to ICE. 

“Officers must follow the law,” the APD spokesperson told Prism.

Lawyers say that this is complicated terrain for the city and police. “They have to toe a very tricky line. Austin can’t make a law that prohibits officers from contacting ICE, or they risk being sued by the state,” said Woodward, of the Texas Civil Rights Project.

But since the deportation of 5-year-old Génesis, Austin community members have mobilized and raised serious concerns over APD’s cooperation with ICE.

APD’s latest policy update has already begun receiving criticism from some Austin City Council members, who in a joint statement, criticized Austin police for having “capitulated to the Governor’s unreasonable demand.” 

“When Governor Abbott threatened to strongarm Austin by gutting our victim services and defunding programs for our at-risk youth, the City had a chance to show every Austinite that their government answers to them, not to political threats.That’s not what happened,” reads the statement from Council Members Vanessa Fuentes, José Velásquez, Mike Siegel, and Zohaib “Zo” Qadri. 

Woodward also said that ICE being able to request that an officer detain someone until immigration officials arrive could potentially violate the Fourth Amendment. 

“A request of an ICE officer to hold a person should not be enough to hold a person for a time beyond what a reasonable suspicion of a crime or a probable cause allows,” Woodward said.

Meanwhile, fallout from APD’s collaboration with ICE continues. Weeks after their deportation to Honduras, Gutiérrez made the difficult decision to send her daughter back to the U.S. without her, Trejo said. 

“The mother made a really difficult decision to send her daughter back, so that she can continue school, all her friends and teachers and aunts and uncles are here. She is an American citizen and has only known this life,” Trejo said. “A family has been torn apart because of the police’s cooperation with ICE.”

Editorial Team:
Sahar Fatima, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor

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