Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have reportedly received guidance to no longer conduct most vehicle stops until further notice, following the two recent deadly shootings in Biddeford and in Texas.
The temporary policy change that numerous national outlets reported on Tuesday morning applies to agents under ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division. Agents are instead being instructed to work with partner law enforcement agencies to make a traffic stop if carrying out a criminal warrant on someone inside of a vehicle. A “federal source” told Fox News that ICE agents will keep making traffic stops if seeking people with “serious or violent criminal histories.”
An ICE spokesperson did not immediately respond to a Press Herald request for comment Tuesday morning but told CNN the agency is “always evaluating our procedures to keep our officers safe and criminals off our streets” while declining to further discuss its tactics.
It is a fairly quick policy shift in the wake of Monday morning’s shooting in Biddeford in which an ICE agent with the Enforcement and Removal Operations division fatally shot 26-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a Colombian man whom immigrant advocates said was authorized to work in the U.S. and whose partner and young child were with him at the time of the deadly incident. Last Tuesday, an ICE agent shot and killed 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston while the Mexican man was driving to a construction site.
ICE agents reportedly have now fatally shot 11 people during the second term of President Donald Trump, who has sought to carry out an aggressive deportation agenda while the Republican-controlled Congress has given billions of more dollars to ICE and to Customs and Border Protection.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and his department initially claimed Monday that Guerrero had “weaponized” his vehicle against agents, and federal officials said he was facing an order of removal from the country while being the subject of a warrant.
But later Monday afternoon, and amid conflicting accounts and videos from witnesses, Mullin told U.S. Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, that Guerrero was not the target of the operation in Biddeford, and ICE then said Guerrero was trying to “flee” when the agent fatally shot him. ICE said multiple agents were conducting “targeted surveillance on the last known address” of an unidentified undocumented immigrant who is facing removal from the country.
Those circumstances echo the Houston case, where Araujo also was not the target of the operation. A lawyer said three men inside Araujo’s van have shared that he was shot through a passenger window and that federal officers were never threatened.
ICE agents in the Maine and Texas shootings were not wearing body cameras, according to officials. U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who voted for GOP-backed proposals earlier this year to fund ICE and said she wants ICE agents to wear body cameras, said in a statement late Tuesday morning that she spoke with Mullin on Monday night and “urged him to cease all non-urgent vehicle stops.”
Collins, whose district office in Biddeford drew protesters Monday, said she spoke with Mullin about “critical questions” regarding the shooting. She did not elaborate on those questions, and her office did not immediately respond Tuesday to a request for comment on what Mullin told her during their Monday conversation.
King spoke with Mullin earlier Monday, and the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general along with the FBI are investigating the Biddeford shooting.
Maine’s congressional delegation, which also includes Democratic Reps. Chellie Pingree and Jared Golden, sent Tuesday a letter to the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general asking for a quick and open investigation.
This is a developing story