ICE has ordered its agents to stop carrying out traffic stops after a wave of deadly shootings, multiple Department of Homeland Security sources say.
The dramatic climbdown came just hours after one of the agency’s own senior officials told PunchUp that bosses should “shut down ops” before anyone else was killed.
The DHS sources told PunchUp—the Beast’s sister investigations outlet on Substack—that Enforcement and Removal Operations field directors have issued internal guidance instructing officers to make no vehicle stops until further notice, following the deaths of two men stopped by ICE agents in Texas and Maine.
The directive was first reported by the Daily Wire, whose three Homeland Security sources said they had been told there would be “no more vehicle stops for now.” One fumed to the outlet: “Numbers are going down, we can’t do s--t.”
The halt threatens to derail the mass-arrest blitz President Donald Trump, 80, covertly ordered at the start of the month, as the Daily Beast reported, which swept up more than 10,000 people in five days.
On Tuesday, a senior ICE official blamed the White House’s quotas for driving exhausted agents into fatal confrontations, as PunchUp and the Beast reported. “There is a demand for 2,000 arrests a day. Leaders are being fired for bad numbers,” the official told PunchUp.
The insider demanded exactly the freeze that has now been imposed. “I would shut down ops until we got a handle on s--t,” they said. “Not doing traffic stops. Not blocking the vehicles. If they run. They run. Find them later. Don’t force a bad position.”
They warned that vehicle stops had become deadly flashpoints for officers “pushed to the breaking point” by the surge: “Traffic stops are the only way to get them. But every stop folks are running. Or ramming.”
Agents shot dead Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, a Mexican homebuilder, in Houston on July 7, and a 26-year-old Colombian named by a neighbor as Joan Sebastian Guerrero, who was heading to work in Biddeford, Maine, on Monday.
Neither man was the target of the operation that killed him. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, 48, told Sen. Angus King, 82, that the Maine victim was not the person agents were after.
DHS claims Salgado Araujo “weaponized his vehicle,” while in Maine, the agency said only that its officer fired “fearing for public safety.”
An ICE spokesperson told the Daily Beast, “We are always evaluating our procedures to keep our officers safe and criminals off our streets,” but added that it would not disclose or discuss law enforcement tactics.
Tom Latchem exposes the secrets, scandals, and stories that powerful people and institutions want to keep under wraps. Follow all of his reporting at PunchUp on Substack.
