The Trump administration has ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers to halt most vehicle stops while carrying out operations across the country, according to sources.
The order comes after Ice officers killed two people over the past week in Houston and the coastal city of Biddeford, Maine, amid a recent surge in immigration arrests. Both were shot after agents tried to stop their vehicles, according to the department of homeland security.
The pause on vehicle stops could hamper the agency’s ability to increase arrests as it faces increasing pressure to deliver on the president’s promise of mass deportations. But it comes as some influential lawmakers and state officials have demanded answers about the latest shootings.
Republican senator Susan Collins, who is running for re-election in Maine this year, said in a statement on Tuesday that the shooting in Biddeford raised important questions and that she had urged Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, to “cease all nonurgent vehicle stops”.
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The White House referred a request for comment to Ice, which said in a statement the agency would not discuss law enforcement tactics.
Tom Homan, the White House border tsar, downplayed the order on Tuesday, saying it was a temporary action that would not impede Ice’s ability to conduct arrests. “It’s a short pause just to make sure we’re doing the right thing,” he said in an interview with Fox News. “Operations continue. Arrests are at record numbers. Deportations are at record numbers.”
The enforcement crackdown that began when US president Donald Trump took office for his second term has resulted in at least 22 people being fired on by federal immigration agents since January 2025. Six people, including three US citizens, have been killed as a result of those shootings, nearly all of which involved officers firing into vehicles.
In Houston last week, an Ice agent killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant who had lived in the country for more than three decades, during a traffic stop while he was driving to work with three passengers. He was not the intended target of the Ice operation, federal officials acknowledged, after initially saying he was.
In Maine early on Monday, an Ice agent shot and killed a Colombian man who was also in his vehicle. He was identified as Joan Sebastian Guerrero, according to a spokesperson for Maine independent senator Angus King. A statement from the homeland security department was unclear about whether Guerrero was the person that agents had been seeking.
Federal officials said the two men had tried to flee the traffic stops, although they did not provide video or other evidence to support those accounts. In several other immigration enforcement shootings, videos have later emerged that contradicted the government’s narrative, and in at least one of those cases, an agent who fired on a Venezuelan immigrant in Minneapolis now faces state charges.
The renewed deportation effort in recent weeks has lacked the fanfare of previous high-profile enforcement surges, including the one in Minneapolis in January. During that operation, two US citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were killed.
On Monday, a county prosecutor in Minneapolis said the justice department had turned over evidence in those shootings to state investigators after months of stonewalling. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
