President Donald Trump said Immigration and Customs Enforcement should keep making traffic stops after recent fatal shootings, even as the Department of Homeland Security moved to suspend most vehicle stops and expand body-camera use across the agency. The fight landed after two fatal ICE shootings within a week, one in Houston and one in Biddeford, Maine, and after a third death in Florida during an immigration enforcement operation. The people at the bottom keep paying. The people at the top keep issuing orders.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican national who worked in construction and was the father of three U.S. citizens, was killed in Houston on July 7. Six days later, Joan Sebastian Guerrero was fatally shot in Biddeford, Maine, on July 13. AP said a 28-year-old man was also struck and killed by a tractor trailer while running from immigration and other federal officers in Florida. Those deaths, all tied to enforcement operations, pushed the agency into a fresh round of scrutiny while officials scrambled to defend the machinery that produced them.
Who Gets Stopped, Who Gets Protected
Trump wrote on his social media site, “We CANNOT give up one of ICE’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” He also said ending those stops would be “playing right into the criminal’s hands.” Hours later, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said people illegally in the country would be “arrested and deported wherever they are,” but he did not directly say whether ICE officers would be allowed to carry out traffic stops. A White House official later said the guidance had been reversed.
The pause applied to agents in Enforcement and Removal Operations, the branch within ICE charged with arresting and deporting undocumented immigrants. It barred agents from initiating stops, though they were told to work with partner agencies if they were executing a criminal warrant on someone in a vehicle. Trump’s administration ordered the pause after the fatal shootings of Salgado Araujo and Guerrero prompted calls for independent investigations and renewed criticism of the agency. Both men were killed during federal immigration enforcement operations, but neither was the target of those operations, sources said.
In Houston, ICE officers said they tried to pull Salgado Araujo over in the early-morning hours of July 7, that he ignored orders, and that he then “weaponized” his vehicle in an attempt to run over an agent. The agency said the agent fired in self-defense. Witnesses in the car with Salgado Araujo called ICE’s account “simply false,” according to their attorney. ICE later said it had mistaken him for someone else when it tried to stop him. That’s the kind of error that gets buried under official language until somebody dies.
What the Cameras Didn’t Catch
Photos showed bullet holes in Guerrero’s car windshield, but the officers involved in the shooting didn’t have body cameras. In both the Houston and Maine shootings, ICE officers were not wearing them. DHS officials told USA TODAY the officers weren’t wearing body cameras because “back-to-back Democrat shutdowns” delayed the rollout of the devices. In a July 15 statement, DHS said ICE will “ensure each arrest team has an individual wearing a body camera.” A DHS spokesperson said the cameras were needed because of increased attacks on officers and said more than half of the field offices had received them, with the rest expected to get them in less than 60 days.
The agency had promised body cameras earlier in the year. In February, then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said “DHS law enforcement across the country” would begin wearing body cameras after the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two U.S. citizens killed by federal officers in Minneapolis in January. DHS officials described both Good and Pretti as “domestic terrorists,” though witnesses and bystander videos contradicted those claims. CNN said some of DHS’s narratives were later undermined by video, court rulings and other evidence. CNN also said DHS leadership faced structural accountability shakeups after Good and Pretti’s deaths, including the removal of Secretary Kristi Noem, and that her successor, Markwayne Mullin, favored a low-key style of immigration enforcement that relied more on targeted operations than large-scale sweeps.
CNN reported that after the Houston and Maine shootings, DHS pledged to “rapidly” deploy body cameras to officers nationally. USA TODAY said ICE issued a policy on Feb. 19 mandating the use of body cameras during immigration enforcement activities. It also said ICE began equipping officers with body cameras in 2021, that the Biden administration ordered federal law enforcement agencies to begin using body cameras in 2022, and that by 2024 around 1,000 ICE officers across five cities were using the technology. USA TODAY said Trump rescinded the order of his Democratic predecessor shortly after coming into office. In March, former acting ICE chief Todd Lyons told Congress that around 3,000 out of 13,000 ICE officers were using body cameras, or less than a quarter of officers. It said it was unclear exactly how many officers ICE employs today, though in January the agency said it had hired and was training enough people to expand to 22,000 officers.
The Politics of Control
The shootings and the pause drew sharp political reaction. Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, said in a statement on July 14 that “it is extremely unfortunate” that the ICE officer involved in the Maine shooting wasn’t wearing a body camera and also blamed Democrats for the hold-up on the rollout of the technology. She said two shootings in a week “raise very serious questions” and warrant a halt in vehicle stops for the time being. Maine’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills, said ICE should be scrapped as a federal agency if it can’t be fixed, and said the agency needs changes “before more families are robbed of a loved one.” Border czar Tom Homan said the investigation needs to play out and that officers will be held accountable if they are found to have acted inappropriately or illegally.
Trump became furious after watching coverage of the temporary change in policy that suggested he was weakening immigration enforcement, according to CNN. Early Wednesday, he ordered it overturned, posting on Truth Social that “The Radical Left Dumocrats would like to see this done, but it won’t happen on my watch.” CNN said prominent MAGA figures, including longtime Trump adviser Steve Bannon and conservative lawyer Mike Davis, criticized the suspension. Davis said on Bannon’s “War Room” show, “You work for President Trump, you don’t work for Senate Democrats, you don’t work for Susan Collins,” and added, “This guy needs to stop being a wimp, he needs to stop being weak, he needs to stop being stupid. If he’s not up to doing the job, get the hell out of the job and we’ll put someone there who can.” Mullin later posted Trump’s reversal and wrote on X, “Our #1 goal is to keep our officers safe and get criminals OFF our streets. Illegal aliens will be arrested and deported wherever they are. If you are here illegally, LEAVE NOW.”
The episode came amid broader scrutiny of ICE enforcement tactics. AP said there have been at least 10 deaths involving encounters with immigration agents since Trump launched his deportation campaign, and at least four involved people in vehicles. AP said Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins urged Department of Homeland Security leaders “to cease all non-urgent vehicle stops.” AP also said ICE has been under pressure to beef up arrest and deportation numbers and that it often blames immigration advocates who advise immigrants to stay in their homes unless ICE produces a warrant signed by an independent judge. ICE officers say that means they’re forced to find other ways to make arrests.
Trump also faced the shootings while preparing a primetime address on elections. AP said he planned a 9 p.m. Thursday speech that could revisit long-debunked conspiracy theories about his 2020 defeat to Democrat Joe Biden and that he had escalated calls for Republicans to pass tighter federal voting rules for November’s midterm elections. Trump said, “It doesn’t get bigger, because without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country,” and added, “We’ll be discussing other things, too,” and, “It’s going to be a very big announcement.” AP said he had used primetime addresses before, including one in December when he blamed the economy on Democrats. AP also said Trump repeated baseless claims of voter fraud in the Los Angeles primary race for mayor on Monday and that federal prosecutors said they were opening fraud investigations in California last month after Trump drew attention to the claim.
CNN said the pause on vehicle stops applied to agents under Enforcement and Removal Operations and that agents were told to work with partner agencies if executing a criminal warrant on someone in a vehicle. CNN said the guidance was later reversed. USA TODAY said the deaths sparked protests in Houston and Biddeford. CNN said the shootings of Salgado Araujo and Guerrero reignited criticism of the agency and prompted calls for independent investigations. The agency’s shifting explanations, the body-camera rollout and the traffic-stop reversal left ICE under intense scrutiny as Trump pressed ahead with his deportation agenda and his broader political fight over elections.