Trump Overrides His Own Agency, Ordering ICE to Resume Traffic Stops After Two Fatal Shootings
The president dismissed an internal pause on vehicle stops days after ICE officers killed two immigrant men who officials concede were not their targets. DHS will now put a body camera on every arrest team.
President Donald Trump on Wednesday overrode a decision by his own administration to pause Immigration and Customs Enforcement traffic stops, insisting that agents keep pulling over vehicles even after two immigrant men were shot and killed by ICE officers in the span of a single week.
The reversal capped a chaotic 48 hours inside the Department of Homeland Security. Earlier in the week, ICE had quietly ordered a halt to most vehicle stops following the fatal shootings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in the Houston area and Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine — both killed during roadside encounters with agents who, officials later conceded, were not their intended targets. Neither of the officers involved was wearing a body camera.
"ICE should continue doing traffic stops," Trump told reporters, brushing aside the internal pause and framing the tactic as essential to his mass-deportation agenda. People familiar with the decision said the president was frustrated that his agency had appeared to retreat under public pressure, and he directed officials to resume the stops immediately.
As a partial concession to the mounting criticism, DHS announced that every ICE arrest team will now include at least one officer equipped with a body-worn camera — an acknowledgment that the absence of footage had deepened public distrust after each of the recent killings. Critics noted that the policy stops short of requiring every agent to be recorded and leaves wide discretion over when the cameras are switched on.
The shootings have intensified a national debate over the aggressiveness of immigration enforcement under the second Trump administration. Immigrant-rights groups and Democratic lawmakers have demanded independent investigations, arguing that roadside stops by heavily armed, plainclothes agents have turned routine encounters deadly. The Mexican government has moved to bring criminal charges tied to a string of deaths connected to ICE operations, and relatives of those killed have pleaded for accountability, saying their family members posed no threat.
DHS has defended its officers, saying they operate in dangerous conditions and have faced a surge in assaults. But the decision to first pause and then abruptly resume the stops — at the president's personal insistence — laid bare the tension between the White House's political imperatives and the safety concerns raised by career officials inside the agency. With ICE expanding operations nationwide under a multibillion-dollar funding boost, the frequency of such encounters is expected to climb, and with it the scrutiny of how, and how often, agents reach for their weapons.
Originally reported by ABC News.