The votes were barely counted before Houston's mayor pulled the plug on cooperation with ICE. After the midterm elections, the mayor ended the partnership with federal immigration authorities, Yahoo News reported. Funny how that timing works. Whatever the cooperation was worth, it was apparently worth just enough to get through an election, and no further.

I can't tell you the exact mechanics of what Houston had with ICE, because the reporting doesn't say, and I don't guess. What the source confirms is simple: there was cooperation, and now there isn't. The sequence is what matters. An arrangement that survived until after the ballots were counted didn't survive long past them. You don't need to be a 26-year Border Patrol veteran to read that calendar.

What generally gets lost when a city walks away from ICE is the jail piece. Local cooperation usually means detainers get honored, meaning criminal aliens in city custody get held briefly for ICE to pick up instead of being released back onto the street. When that stops, the detainers stop getting honored, and the criminal aliens don't disappear. They go home to your neighborhood.

ICE will keep working Houston regardless. Federal authority doesn't need a mayor's blessing, and Houston is way too big a target-rich environment for enforcement to just stop. What changes is efficiency. Without jail cooperation, ICE has to burn officer hours hunting people one at a time in the community instead of picking them up in a controlled custody setting. That means more street arrests, more chances for things to go sideways, and fewer bad guys per officer-hour. Every cop I ever worked with understood the jail detainer was the safest arrest you'll ever make. The suspect's already cuffed.

What's galling is the timing. If ending the cooperation was the right thing to do, do it in the spring and own it. Waiting until after an election tells you the mayor knew exactly how it would play at the ballot box. The voters were owed the policy they were going to get. They got shown one version and handed another.

The mayor's office will talk about community trust and local resources. Fine. But when the next illegal alien with a detainer walks out of a Houston-area jail and picks up a new charge, remember who unlocked the door and when they decided to do it. My notebook stays open.

Scoreboard: one mayor, zero courage, and a calendar that tells the whole story.