ICE halts most traffic-stop arrests in wake of fatal shootings

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has temporarily instructed officers to refrain from making traffic-stop arrests in most cases, according to several people with knowledge of the directive, a policy shift spurred by a pair of fatal shootings over the past week.

The pause comes as the Trump administration scrambles to respond to the incidents in Houston last week and in Biddeford, Maine, on Monday in which officers fired into vehicles and killed immigrants from Mexico and Colombia, respectively. Three former federal immigration officials said they were informed by current Department of Homeland Security officials of the pause - which one person said covers vehicle stops and pertains to officers within ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division.

“Guidance was sent nationwide from ICE HQ - no vehicle interactions whatsoever,” said one former official, who like the others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private communications.

Specifics of the pause were not immediately available.

“We are always evaluating our procedures to keep our officers safe and criminals off our streets,” an ICE spokesperson said. “We will not disclose or discuss law enforcement tactics.”

DHS has said the officers in both Houston and Biddeford fired defensively after the drivers allegedly resisted arrest and endangered the officers and the public as they attempted to drive away. But local officials and immigrant rights groups in both cities have questioned the government’s narrative and called for independent investigations of the shootings.

The mounting questions surrounding those incidents have renewed public scrutiny of ICE’s aggressive tactics, as lawmakers, policing experts and former federal immigration officials have called on the agency to review its training methods and use-of-force policies.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who is facing a tough reelection campaign in November, said Tuesday that she asked Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to cease “all non-urgent vehicle stops.”

“While the investigation of the Biddeford shooting is not yet complete, it raises sufficient critical questions,” Collins said in a statement.

John Sandweg, who served as acting ICE director in the Obama administration, said it made sense for the agency to halt vehicle stops given that ICE officers have been responsible for five fatal shootings while firing on vehicles since President Donald Trump took office last year.

Sandweg said ICE, under past administrations, typically made the vast majority of arrests of undocumented immigrants at prisons and jails. He said pressure on officers to ramp up arrests under Trump’s mass-deportation campaign has increased the number of vehicle stops and the dangers associated with them.

“Add it all up, and you’re asking the agents to do something that is not part of their core mission,” Sandweg said. “They’re not as well-versed and -trained compared to a city patrol officer. There’s got to be a moratorium on how to avoid this.”

Shooting into a moving vehicle breaks with broadly accepted best practices for law enforcement.

David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, said doing so creates a risk of two dangerous scenarios: hitting someone who is not the target or incapacitating the driver and putting others at risk from a moving car.

The only valid reason to shoot is if the officer or someone else faces “a serious, grave injury or death from the vehicle,” Harris said. “It’s so dangerous. You’re just taking an enormous chance when you do this.”

Law enforcement officials in many districts have imposed restrictions on when officers can fire at a vehicle. Chicago police, for instance, prohibit officers from firing at or into a moving car “when the vehicle is the only force used.” The department grants exceptions as “a last resort” to stop someone from being seriously harmed or killed.

Los Angeles police are also barred from shooting at moving vehicles unless someone inside poses an immediate threat to the officer or another person “with deadly force by means other than the vehicle.” If a moving vehicle does pose a threat to an officer, they should move out of the way rather than fire at it, according to department policy.

Confronting drivers during an enforcement operation is a “worst-case scenario,” said Daniel Altman, the former director of internal affairs at U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Those situations create split-second decisions for both officers and drivers, he said, that often result in officer-involved shootings and vehicle crashes.

Thaddeus Johnson, a senior research fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, said that the Biddeford shooting demonstrates the risk of such scenarios. Surveillance camera footage shows the car of the man who was shot slowly circling the road after the gunfire, with officers trying to halt its progress.

If an elderly person or a child had been in the vicinity, they could have been injured by the car’s progress, Johnson said, even if the car was advancing slowly. Other ICE-involved shootings have led to higher-speed crashes. In Minneapolis, Renée Good, after she was shot, accelerated down the road, ultimately crashing into a parked car.

Altman also criticized DHS for failing to ensure that officers were wearing body cameras during the Biddeford shooting. He said the cameras give a window, albeit an imperfect one, into an officer’s experience during a shooting, adding that it is difficult to draw any conclusion about use of force from surveillance videos such as those from Biddeford.