Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin ordered the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Tuesday to temporarily halt vehicle stops in response to two fatal shootings less than a week apart.
The DHS originally planned to keep the directive in place until ICE officers receive additional training on conducting vehicle stops, reports CBS News. But some exceptions apply: “ICE will continue conducting vehicle stops only for those considered to be the most egregious targets with serious or violent criminal histories,” according to Fox News.
Critics of the sudden change argue the new policy will lower ICE’s arrest and removal rate, which rose to over 10,000 arrests in just five days at the end of June. President Donald Trump contradicted the order on Wednesday, calling traffic stops “one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools.” He ordered ICE to “go back and do your very important job” in a Truth Social post, saying the policy, supported by “Radical Left Dumocrats” wouldn’t happen on his watch, apparently overturning the pause to vehicle stops by ICE.
But others on the right support the pause on vehicle stops, such as border czar Tom Homan, who told Fox News he’s confident the change will ultimately improve officer training and outcomes without affecting ICE arrests. Those critical of Trump’s immigration crackdown also support the pause and have called for even more restrictions and accountability for immigration agents’ controversial enforcement tactics in the wake of the two fatal shootings.
The DHS has claimed the officers involved in the shootings feared for their lives in both the Houston, Texas, and Biddeford, Maine, vehicle stops, but eyewitness accounts have complicated this narrative. In Houston, passengers in the vehicle driven by 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo dispute ICE’s account of the incident. “They confirmed that at no point was there ever an ICE agent directly in front of the vehicle,” Hugo Balderas, the lawyer for two of the three passengers, told Houston Public Media. And in Maine, one witness told [new link] CBS News he heard 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero tell officers “I tried to stop” when he was pulled from the vehicle shortly after the shooting took place.
No video footage exists to corroborate the accounts of either vehicle stop, despite former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem expanding the body camera program nationwide in early February in response to the killings of Alex Pretti and Renée Good. Over five months later, the agency has failed to implement the fairly standard police tech—a particularly egregious failure considering the agencies’ combined $240 billion immigration enforcement budget as of May, including $20 million specifically to equip agents with body cameras. But the DHS has recently renewed its promise in response to the most recent fatal shootings.
According to an emailed statement by Mike Fox, a legal fellow in the Cato Institutes’ Project on Criminal Justice, “in both fatal shootings…agents used excessive force, proving that the [DHS’] robust use-of-force policy is virtually meaningless to the extent its agents are free to violate it with impunity.”
Since Trump took office in January 2025, the DHS and its subsidiary agencies have violated more than just their use-of-force policies. Amid a campaign to hire over 12,000 new officers, the agencies have been accused of not only using excessive force against undocumented immigrants and American citizens, but also conducting arrests without probable cause in violation of federal law, and repeatedly violating court orders regarding unlawful detentions. Earlier this year, a leaked ICE memo revealed the agency had secretly adopted a policy allowing immigration agents to forcibly enter homes without first obtaining a judicial warrant, in contradiction to earlier training guidelines and Fourth Amendment law.
“Because the [DHS] has repeatedly proven itself incapable of abiding by the letter and spirit of the law,” says Fox, temporary pauses and internal guidelines, like the pause on vehicle stops or Noem’s pledge to deploy body cameras, are “entirely insufficient.”
“It is now incumbent upon Congress to step in and clearly legislate when, where, and if at all, [federal] immigration enforcement agents…should be permitted to conduct traffic stops,” he continued.
Trump replaced Noem earlier this year due to mounting concerns over her performance, and named Mullin as her successor. But even Mullin’s attempts at a lower-profile approach to immigration enforcement haven’t been enough for the agency to outrun what Fox calls a “deep-seated crisis of federal accountability.”
Although the temporary pause on vehicle stops “will undoubtedly save lives, and additional training is a welcome step,” says Fox, it will “not solve the underlying issue.”
“True reform requires Congress to take up the Bivens Act…[and] pursue the wholesale abolition of qualified immunity,” he adds. These changes would allow individuals to sue federal officials who violate their constitutional rights, including officers who use excessive force.
“True justice and systemic change cannot be achieved through temporary agency memos,” says Fox, “but only through permanent legislative guardrails that subject federal officers to real, external accountability measures.”
