ICE agents were told to largely suspend vehicle stops on Tuesday, then the directive changed again after border czar Tom Homan finished a round of interviews downplaying the significance of those traffic stops and predicting the temporary change wouldn’t greatly affect immigration-related arrests. The flip-flop came at the direction of President Donald Trump, a White House official said, after the pause made him furious, two sources familiar with the matter said, as prominent MAGA voices suggested his administration was weakening immigration enforcement.
The order landed in the middle of a federal machine already soaked in blood. The move came after two fatal shootings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents under the broad command of the incoming DHS secretary, Markwayne Mullin. The killings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Joan Sebastian Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, both came at the end of traffic stops, which had become a critical tool for agents trying to meet the Trump administration’s goal of around 2,000 arrests a day. That’s the machinery at work: a quota-driven dragnet, a badge, a gun, and ordinary people paying the price.
Support for the Trump administration’s intense focus on immigration enforcement was falling early this year after high-profile operations resulted in controversial deportations, violent confrontations with protesters and, ultimately, two US citizens shot to death in January on the streets of Minneapolis. The public relations problem is obvious. The violence keeps happening anyway.
Who Gets Crushed
Mullin told a congressional panel in mid-March, “My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day.” Although there are two months left to go on that self-imposed deadline, his hope for a quiet summer of inconspicuous immigration arrests was foiled by the two fatal shootings. Within DHS, officials privately have shared concerns that repeated agency-involved firearm discharges — there have been 10 such incidents in 2026 — will derail the public sentiment Mullin has tried to rebuild on the heels of Noem’s ouster.
The people at the bottom of this system don’t get deadlines, messaging strategies or damage control. They get stopped, searched, detained, shot, and then folded into a bureaucratic explanation after the fact. The numbers tell the story the agency won’t.
Trump wrote Wednesday morning on Truth Social, “We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” He added, “Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands.” He also wrote, “I.C.E., be judicious, fair and smart, and go back and do your very important job.”
What They Call Enforcement
ICE is now instituting additional training, including for crowd control, high-risk vehicle stops and medical training, plus a live-fire cover course, a DHS spokesperson said Wednesday. On June 2, ICE reextended its training program to 71 days, which applied to all new training classes beginning July 1, the spokesperson said, adding previous graduates will get “follow-on training.” The spokesperson said, “As we have said all along, ICE training does not end when recruits graduate from the academy.” The spokesperson added, “ICE officers go through a rigorous on-the-job training and mentorship. This additional training is tracked online and monitored closely.”
That’s the official language of the apparatus: more training, more monitoring, more control, more force. The state keeps polishing the same weapon and calling it safety.
John Sandweg, an attorney and former acting director of ICE in the Obama administration, said, “It takes a little more time if you’re going to wait for the person to arrive at their destination.” He added, “There’s just this desire to ratchet up the arrest numbers.” Sandweg also said, “More and more people are educated that they’re not required as a matter of law to let ICE in without a judicial warrant,” referring to the kind signed by a judge. He said, “I talk to former ICE agents and state and local police all the time. They’ll tell you that a traffic stop is one of the most dangerous things law enforcement can do.” He added, “The officers feel like they are at risk, and we see the consequences of that.”
What People Actually Did
The article says traditional efforts to take undocumented immigrants into custody from their homes have become less effective because surveilling neighborhoods, door knocking and using DHS administrative warrants have been frustrated by expanding networks of community organizers who inform immigrants of their legal rights and warn them when federal agents are nearby. That’s the only part of this story that looks like people organizing for themselves instead of waiting for permission from the people hunting them.
It also says the legal standard for charging law enforcement for a shooting in the line of duty remains high, and no criminal charges have been filed against any immigration enforcement officer involved in this year’s fatal traffic stop cases. The law protects the armed institution first. Accountability comes later, if it comes at all.
In the killings amid traffic stops of Good in Minneapolis and Salgado Araujo in Houston, ICE claimed the suspects had used their vehicles as weapons against officers, assertions denied by passengers in Salgado Araujo’s van and contradicted by video of Good’s shooting. After Monday’s fatal shooting of Durán Guerrero in Maine, ICE’s official statement said, “The vehicle attempted to flee the scene and fearing for public safety an officer discharged his weapon.” Elliot Williams, a CNN Legal Analyst who served at ICE during the Obama administration, said, “This vague idea of public safety without more is not sufficient to justify … deadly force.” A federal law enforcement source said, “Every law enforcement officer in America is scratching their head trying to figure out what that means,” stressing that an investigation — including from the officer’s vantage point — must be done to understand what happened.
Trump’s order restored the traffic stops. The shootings stayed on the record. The arrests keep climbing, the training keeps expanding, and the people being hunted are left to deal with the consequences of a system that calls itself public safety while moving like a raid.