Senior ICE officials are blaming President Donald Trump’s demand for mass arrests for a wave of deadly shootings by immigration agents—with one warning that officers “pushed to the breaking point” are being forced into fatal confrontations, PunchUp reports.
Agents have shot dead two men in less than a week—Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, a Mexican homebuilder killed in Houston on July 7, and a 26-year-old Colombian man named by a neighbor as Joan Sebastian Guerrero, who was shot through his windshield in Biddeford, Maine, on Monday.
The killings came days after Trump, 80, issued a covert order for an arrest surge that swept up more than 10,000 people in five days, as the Daily Beast reported on July 2, with field bosses told the White House expected 2,000 detentions every day, according to the New York Times.
One senior official has now told PunchUp—the Beast’s new sister investigations Substack outlet launched this year—that those quotas are behind the bloodshed.
“They are being forced to have quotas again. They are being pushed for numbers and quotas,” the official said. “There is a demand for 2,000 arrests a day. Leaders are being fired for bad numbers.”
The insider described a workforce stretched past its limits. “They are canceling leave. Stretching the field thin. Pushing them to the extremes. It’s a very bad, toxic environment. Morale is horrible.”
Agents were denied Independence Day off. “Eighty percent of the office has to be in the field. Made them work on July 4th,” they said, adding, “It’s not sustainable. And it’s not safe. It’s bad.”
Vehicle stops were at the center of both of the past week’s shootings—and the official said they have become a flashpoint: “Traffic stops are the only way to get them. But every stop folks are running. Or ramming.”
The official wants enforcement paused altogether. “I would shut down ops until we got a handle on s--t,” they told PunchUp. “Not doing traffic stops. Not blocking the vehicles. If they run. They run. Find them later. Don’t force a bad position.”
They urged bosses to “get sneakers to the field” and “talk to the folks in the field” to solve the crisis.
DHS claims Salgado Araujo—a father who had lived in the U.S. for decades—“weaponized his vehicle” during a stop in Houston’s East End. But acting ICE director David Venturella admitted to Rep. Sylvia Garcia, 75, that he was never the target, and none of the agents wore body cameras.
In Maine, agents staking out another man’s address shot at Guerrero as he headed to work. Photos show four bullet holes in the windshield of his Kia.
This time, DHS said only that its officer fired “fearing for public safety”—a marked retreat from the aggressive self-defense claims it made in January, when agents killed U.S. citizens Renee Good, 37, and Alex Pretti, also 37, in Minneapolis.
The Beast previously reported that federal immigration agents shot at least 14 people in the six months to February.
Good, an unarmed mother of three, was gunned down by ICE agent Jonathan Ross on Jan. 7 as she tried to drive away from officers. Pretti, a VA intensive care nurse, was wrestled to the ground and shot at a protest on Jan. 24.
PunchUp revealed in April that Ross had been quietly moved to a new role in a new state while the FBI probe into Good’s killing stalled.
On Monday, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced federal prosecutors had finally handed over hard drives of statements and bodycam footage—plus the Honda Pilot Good was shot in—after Minnesota sued the administration in March. “The wonderful thing now is we have all the evidence,” Moriarty said.
The Good family’s attorney, Antonio Romanucci, 65, called it “an important and meaningful step towards justice and accountability.”
A senior ICE official, who told PunchUp in April that the FBI needed to “s--t or get off the pot” over the Good investigation, called the handover “a good first step.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House, DHS, and ICE for comment.
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.
