President Biden’s nominee to lead the country’s deportation agency faced a domestic violence accusation from his wife, according to documents filed in a tangentially related sexual harassment lawsuit.
Police were called to investigate Ed Gonzalez, currently the sheriff of Harris County, Texas, after his wife, Melissa, said he became “physical or violent” because she was having an affair with a supervisor at her job, according to an affidavit from one of the officers who responded to investigate.
The affidavit does not say what the officer concluded about the accusation.
The accusation came to light just as Senate Democrats planned to vote as early as Tuesday to confirm Sheriff Gonzalez to be the next director at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Sen. James Lankford said the vote should be postponed until senators can get to the bottom of what happened.
“It would be irresponsible for the Senate to vote on the confirmation of Sheriff Gonzalez to be director of ICE until we determine whether the allegations outlined in the attached affidavit are true,” the Oklahoma Republican wrote in a letter to top Democrats.
Chris Crane, director of the Federal Police Foundation and president of the National ICE Council, the labor union for ICE officers, also called for the confirmation to be delayed.
“The ‘good old boy’ culture that currently exists within our agency needs to end, and the next director must be a person of honor and integrity, who leads by example, holds themselves and their managers to the highest standards, is determined to end mismanagement, incompetence and misconduct within our agency and adhere to the rule of law,” Mr. Crane wrote in a letter.
Sheriff Gonzalez’s office referred questions to the White House, which did not respond to a request for comment.
The three-page affidavit was filed July 30 in federal court in the Southern District of Texas in a case brought by Patricia Dodd, a former instructor at Houston Community College. Ms. Dodd claimed she was sexually harassed by Robert Glaser, a member of the college’s board. She said she was pressured to have sex with Mr. Glaser, but he said the relationship was consensual.
As part of her $15 million lawsuit, Ms. Dodd said Mr. Glaser’s behavior mirrored that of Cesar Maldonado, the school’s chancellor, who she said was having a relationship with a vice chancellor. She said the vice chancellor was the sheriff’s wife.
To back up those accusations, she filed the affidavit from Frederick Portis, a police officer at the college who said he was called to investigate “an alleged domestic dispute” involving Mrs. Gonzalez. Mr. Maldonado was present when officers showed up to investigate.
“The chancellor spoke up and said that Mrs. Gonzalez wanted to file a complaint against her husband, Sheriff Gonzalez, because of suggested violence she had experienced at her home at the hands of the sheriff,” the officer recounted.
The officer said the gist of the complaint was “the sheriff allegedly becoming physical or violent with Mrs. Gonzalez because of her romantic relationship with the chancellor.”
He said he filed an investigative report with the college police chief but never heard anything more and was “not aware of criminal charges being filed against Sheriff Ed Gonzalez.”
Mr. Lankford, in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, and Sen. Gary C. Peters, Michigan Democrat and chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, indicated that senators were not made aware of the incident even though the affidavit was filed before the committee voted twice on the nomination.
Neither Mr. Peters’ office nor Mr. Schumer’s office responded to inquiries from The Times on the accusation or on postponing a vote.
Mr. Crane, in his letter to senators, said the issue is serious enough to demand a delay.
“Federal law enforcement agencies are entrusted by the American people to enforce laws passed by our elected representatives, and to do so in an honorable, humane, and respectable fashion, and must meet the highest standards of trust and excellence. The leaders of federal law enforcement agencies must therefore be beyond reproach,” Mr. Crane wrote.
The ICE Council last year blasted Sheriff Gonzalez for his answers during his confirmation hearing — including discounting the reports of officers who said the Biden administration was pressuring them not to enforce the law.
“I do not believe it’s true,” the sheriff told senators.
ICE officers, however, say it is true. They recount instances of bringing cases to supervisors to arrest and deport sex predators, spousal abusers and drunken drivers, only to have the cases rejected as not fitting in with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ policies.
Documentation submitted to a federal court shows ICE is even canceling previous deportation arrests on illegal immigrants with serious criminal records, including one man in Texas who killed a teenage girl in a hit-and-run car crash.
“To state publicly, at a Senate hearing no less, that the law enforcement officers he asks senators to entrust him with leading, are being untruthful with the public, when he has no basis whatsoever for making such a judgment, is extremely concerning to us,” Mr. Crane wrote in July.
ICE hasn’t had a confirmed director since the end of the Obama administration — or more than five years.
President Trump’s nominees languished on Capitol Hill, as has Sheriff Gonzalez. The other two immigration agencies at the Department of Homeland Security — Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — have confirmed chiefs.
ICE, however, is in a trickier situation. Many of Mr. Biden’s most liberal supporters argue that the agency should be deeply curtailed or axed altogether.
Given that pressure, Mr. Biden looked outside the agency for someone to take the helm and landed in April on Sheriff Gonzalez, a critic of the Trump administration’s handling of immigration.
As sheriff, he ended a program that allowed deputies to cooperate with ICE in identifying deportation targets and defended sanctuary cities, which resist working with ICE.
The sheriff drew complaints from immigrant rights activists last year after his confirmation hearing for failing to be more critical of the agency. The groups also blasted him for saying that while he ended Harris County’s cooperation agreement, it was not his “intent” to scrap the program nationwide at ICE.
The Homeland Security Committee approved the nomination in August, but the full Senate never took action and his nomination expired at the end of the year. Mr. Biden renewed the pick in January, and the committee approved it in a 7-4 party-line vote.
