By Susan Heavey, Kristina Cooke and Joseph Ax
WASHINGTON, July 15 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump directed federal immigration agents on Wednesday to resume traffic stops as an arrest tactic, overruling top administration officials after agents fatally shot two drivers in Texas and Maine within days of each other.
The reversal came a day after White House border czar Tom Homan said Immigration and Customs Enforcement would suspend most vehicle stops on an indefinite but short-term, temporary basis to review procedures to “make sure ICE agents are safe and doing the right thing.”
Homan’s comments on Tuesday, on Fox News Channel, drew sharp criticism from some of Trump’s hardline Republican faithful, including conservative political strategist Mike Davis, and the president countermanded Homan and his Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin the next day.
“We must be strong, tough, and smart, and we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” Trump wrote in a social media post.
The agency’s aggressive tactics came under renewed public scrutiny this week after an ICE officer on Monday killed a driver from Colombia in the coastal Maine town of Biddeford, about 15 miles (24 km) south of Portland. Six days earlier, another ICE officer in Houston shot dead a Mexican national.
In both cases, the agents had attempted to pull over the drivers, though officials have acknowledged they were not the targets of immigration enforcement operations being conducted at the time.
Federal authorities have offered no evidence to support contentions that either man posed a threat to ICE agents or the public at large that would justify the use of lethal force to stop them. In other instances involving violent encounters, initial statements from immigration enforcement officials have been contradicted by video or other evidence.
POLITICAL FALLOUT
The back-to-back shootings also sparked protests in Maine, Houston and Boston, raised questions over ICE agents’ lack of body cameras and thrust the debate over ICE tactics to the forefront of a closely watched Senate race in Maine, a state far from the U.S.-Mexico border.
“The automobile stops should be halted until those investigations are completed,” Republican Senator Susan Collins told reporters in the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.
Collins, seeking re-election in a race that could tip Senate control in favor of Democrats, took credit on Tuesday for urging Mullin to suspend ICE vehicle stops.
Between early June and early July, ICE arrests in Maine more than quadrupled to around 70 per day, according to internal ICE data shared with Reuters by a source familiar with the matter.
At least seven people have been shot dead during federal immigration enforcement operations since January 2025, when Trump launched mass deportations after returning to office following campaign promises of an immigration crackdown.
Fifty-three people have died in ICE custody during the same period, agency records show.
The latest ICE detainee to die was identified by the government as Jesus Manuel Arenas-Silva, 45, a Venezuelan national who was found unconscious on Monday while being transferred between migrant detention centers in Georgia.
ICE said the suspected cause of death was cardiac arrest.
Arenas-Silva had underlying health issues, and ICE agents who took him into custody at his home ignored family pleas to take along all the medications he needed, leaving him without those drugs during his detention until he died, according to a statement from migrant advocates, citing information from his family.
Nationwide arrests of immigrants have surged in recent weeks, despite the Trump administration’s shift to more targeted operations, away from the broad street sweeps that characterized earlier crackdowns in Democratic-led cities. Those heavy-handed tactics drew a public outcry, especially after two U.S. citizens were shot dead in Minnesota earlier this year.
The driver shot dead on Monday in Biddeford, Maine, south of the state’s largest city, Portland, was identified by family as 25-year-old Johan Sebastian Duran, a Colombian national with a wife and a 3-year-old daughter. He was authorized to work in the U.S., according to immigration advocates.
ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, characterized him as an “illegal alien,” as it did Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, who had lived in Houston for three decades before he was fatally shot behind the wheel of his work van on July 7 in the city’s heavily Hispanic East End.
(Reporting by Susan Heavey and Joseph Ax; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Deepa Babington)
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