Trump says ICE should continue traffic stops, contradicting earlier suspension
France 24 · LC · trust 61/100
US President Donald Trump on Wednesday said US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should continue to use traffic stops despite a decision the previous day to suspend the practice. The ban on vehicle stops came after an ICE agent fatally shot a Colombian driver in Maine and another motorist was killed in Texas last week by immigration officers.
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ICE is “doing a GREAT job, one that has to be done”, Trump wrote on his social media site.
The Republican president wrote that to remove "criminals" he claimed were let into the country under the previous Democratic administration, “we must be strong, tough, and smart, and we CANNOT give up one of ICE’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP! Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands”.
President Donald Trump on July 15, 2026 said Immigration and Customs Enforcement should continue traffic stops after recent fatal shootings. © Screengrab, Truth Social @realDonaldTrump Trump administration officials told ICE officers to suspend most vehicle stops on Tuesday. Matthew Felling, a spokesperson for Maine Senator Angus King, said the senator’s office was told by the Department of Homeland Security that ICE was suspending stops.
The suspension of vehicle stops would allow for exceptions when executing a criminal warrant or working with partner agencies, according to a person who spoke Tuesday to AP on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive law enforcement operations.
The suspension was ordered after an ICE officer shot and killed a Colombian driver Monday in Maine .
That fatal shooting came a week after another officer shot and killed a motorist in Houston, renewing criticism of the agency’s enforcement tactics that were widely condemned last winter after the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minnesota.
In Florida on Tuesday, a third man in roughly a week died during an encounter with immigration officers. This time, a 28-year-old man was killed after he was hit by a tractor trailer while running from immigration and other federal officers, authorities said.
It’s a narrative that has been repeated again and again since the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown began, with federal officers confronting drivers and then saying they opened fire when the drivers' vehicles became a danger. That’s despite decades of warnings from policing experts that shooting into moving cars presents a danger of its own and should almost always be avoided.
There have been at least 10 deaths involving encounters with immigration agents since Trump launched his deportation campaign. At least four of those deaths involved people in vehicles, including the one last week in Houston, a trend so troubling that US Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said Tuesday that she had urged Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin “to cease all non-urgent vehicle stops”.
John Sandweg, who was acting director at ICE, which is part of DHS, during President Barack Obama 's Democratic administration, estimated recently that there have been roughly 18 traffic stop shootings during the Trump immigration crackdown.
The office of Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, was told by DHS that ICE was suspending traffic stops, office spokesperson Matthew Felling said.
ICE, which has been under pressure to beef up arrest and deportation numbers, often says people it's trying to arrest are increasingly resistant to leaving their homes. ICE officers blame immigration advocates who advise immigrants to stay in their homes unless ICE produces a warrant signed by an independent judge instead of the administrative warrants the agency generally uses that are signed by another ICE officer. So, ICE officers say, they’re forced to find other areas in which to make arrests.
Hundreds of people in Maine protested Tuesday over the fatal shooting of Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian national. Advocacy groups said Guerrero, who had a wife and a young daughter, was authorized to work in the United States.
DHS said Monday that an officer, “fearing for public safety”, shot and killed Duran Guerrero while officers were watching the home of someone they believed was in the US illegally and facing a final order of removal from the country. It said in a post on X that when ICE tried to stop a car driven by someone who came from the home, the person attempted to flee in the vehicle and the officer fired.
That was a shift from how King earlier described the encounter, when he said Mullin told him the officer opened fire after the man tried to use his vehicle as a weapon. King said Mullin told him the officers were trying to serve an arrest warrant but not for the man who was shot.
In a scathing post on X, outgoing Colombian President Gustavo Petro called the shooting a targeted killing “at the hands of the U.S. government”.
Petro, who has openly quarrelled with Trump, urged Trump to provide an explanation and accused ICE officers of treating Duran Guerrero as “an inferior being without rights”.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro on July 14, 2026 called the fatal shooting a targeted killing “at the hands of the US government.” © Screengrab, X @petrogustavo In Wednesday's social media post, Trump told ICE to be “judicious, fair and smart, and go back and do your very important job”.
Maine’s congressional delegation on Tuesday demanded a “comprehensive, transparent, and expedited investigation”.
Photos showed bullet holes in Durán Guerrero’s car windshield, but the officers involved in the shooting didn’t have body cameras, leaving many questions. Among them are how close the officer was to the vehicle when shooting, whether…
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