ICE pauses vehicle stops nationwide after deadly shootings

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has paused vehicle stops nationwide after two recent shootings in Texas and Maine in which ICE officials killed people in cars, according to The Guardian. Federal immigration officials were instructed by email to stop pulling over vehicles “until further notice”, with Fox News and CNN confirming the instruction was sent across the country.

The policy shift follows the fatal shooting of Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, and the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Texas, less than a week earlier, The Guardian reports. In both cases, ICE officials involved were not wearing body cameras. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told the paper that procedures are always being evaluated to keep officers safe and criminals off the streets, but declined to discuss tactics.

Fox News reported that some stops would still be permitted to target “the most egregious criminal aliens”, and that the suspension would be temporary while ICE officers receive new training. That framing highlights how enforcement agencies often react to reputational shocks: the public sees a death and asks who is accountable; the bureaucracy responds with a process change that is hard to audit from the outside, because the details are treated as operational secrets.

The shootings have renewed calls for independent investigations, with communities, lawmakers and civil liberties groups pressing for scrutiny, according to The Guardian. Since January 2025, federal immigration officials including ICE and Customs and Border Protection have shot and killed 11 people, the paper reports, with five of those killed by ICE officials — including Guerrero and Salgado — in their vehicles. In most cases, DHS has said people “weaponized” their cars against officers, but the Guardian notes that in separate incidents those claims have later been disputed after footage emerged.

A pause on vehicle stops is also an admission about what the agency has been relying on. Pulling over cars is one of the most discretionary tools in policing: it creates contact, produces arrests, and generates statistics, but it also creates the kind of fast-moving confrontation where narratives are set by whoever controls the first statement — especially when there is no body-camera record. Training can change checklists; it cannot recreate evidence after the fact.

In Biddeford, The Guardian described a makeshift memorial appearing a day after Guerrero’s death. The operational change came by email; the accountability argument is still being made in the street.