Oops, ICE Killed Too Many People in Vehicle Stops for Markwayne Mullin’s Taste

Update: Only a day after ICE suspended its vehicle stop policy following two shooting deaths in less than a week, President Donald Trump has already demanded the policy’s return, directly contradicting his underlings as he famously loves to do. Issuing a typically deranged screed on Truth Social on Wednesday morning, he exhorted members of ICE to “remember, you are loved and respected in America” (lol), and demanded that ”We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” Sounds like Donald Trump wants more death headlines, even if ICE doesn’t.

You don’t have to be some kind of statistician or actuary to notice that as the grim death toll associated with killings by federal immigration agents continues to rise–most recently with two deaths in a single week, those of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero–there are some obvious commonalities. For one thing, agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol have a rather nasty habit of choosing to initiate their confrontations while a suspect is driving a motor vehicle, by initiating a traffic stop. One wonders why they would do this so often, given that they then have a tendency to immediately become fearful for their lives and the lives of others when there’s a person they’re attempting to detain behind the wheel of a car. Anyone who has been paying the slightest bit of attention since the start of the second Trump administration, well before the shooting of Renee Good turned into a public disgrace for the agency, could have told ICE’s officials that these vehicle stops were always a profoundly bad idea. And now it seems that even DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin has seen enough incendiary headlines to agree?

Multiple outlets are reporting that word has come down from the Department of Homeland Security Secretary saying that ICE agents are being ordered to stop conducting vehicle stops on their targets … at least temporarily, while “new training” is conducted on this specific type of scenario. Mullin reportedly gave the direction after speaking with Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who urged him–as many other legislators have as well–to “cease all non-urgent vehicle stops.” No doubt Collins is currently fearful for her reelection chances in the upcoming November midterm elections, with a fresh ICE death in her own backyard and a crowded field of new candidates gunning to replace Graham Platner and take her on. The last thing she needed was a slain 26-year-old as yet another victim of ICE agents who claimed hours after the Monday incident that they fired upon Johan Guerrero’s moving vehicle in the interest of “public safety.”

DHS claims the ICE agent who killed a man in Maine yesterday was “fearing for public safety.” But shooting into a moving vehicle endangers the public & it’s against policy. It’s just like claims a driver weaponized his vehicle against ICE-a claim that’s often made but never true in these situations.

— Joyce White Vance (@joycewhitevance.bsky.social) 8:32 AM · Jul 14, 2026

But as for this pause in vehicle stops: How exactly are you planning to rectify the problem, while simultaneously claiming that agents are in the right every single time they fire on anyone operating a car? If they’re in the right, why issue a pause at all? Whenever one of these incidents occurs, it has become the knee-jerk DHS policy to simply insist, without evidence, that the now dead person had “weaponized their vehicle” against law enforcement, thus conferring the right of those federal agents to immediately act as judge, jury and executioner. Will their new training tell them to do something different? Does this have anything to do with the fact that training for new ICE recruits was slashed in length and detail in 2025 when Trump returned to office?

I mean really, look at the utter insistence of an unnamed DHS spokesperson, speaking to The Guardian, saying that this has not been a pattern of immigration agents killing people, but a pattern of people asking to get killed: “The pattern is NOT of law enforcement using deadly force. It’s a pattern of vehicles being used as weapons by violent agitators to attack our law enforcement. Dangerous criminals—whether they be illegal aliens or U.S. citizens—are assaulting law enforcement and turning their vehicles into weapons to attack law enforcement.”

It’s rather difficult to imagine what immigration agents would be told to do any differently in this “training”–which is occurring simultaneously all around the country in the span of a few days, I take it?–that they aren’t already being told to do and then ignoring. DHS policy already clearly states in writing, for instance, that federal agents are forbidden from firing or using deadly force on a fleeing subject simply to prevent them from being able to flee. This very obviously creates a scenario where any time an agent makes the decision to use deadly force on a fleeing target, they effectively have no choice but to claim that they did so in self defense, or because the target posed a “significant threat of death or serious physical harm.” Doing anything else could get them punished, so what incentive does any agent have to be the least bit honest about how an incident played out, when the department will fight tooth and nail to hide your sins? Of particular note on that front: both the recent shootings of Araujo (in Texas) and Guerrero (in Maine) were carried out by ICE agents not wearing body cameras, despite the fact that ICE policy has called for the universal use of cameras for nearly a year at this point. It’s almost as if the department doesn’t want for there to be a video record of these incidents!

Every Witness to ICE Killing in Houston Says the Same Thing: ICE Lied

The three men in Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s vehicle were interviewed separately. They all said ICE’s version of events isn’t true.
newrepublic.com/post/212940/…

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— StrictlyChristo 🇺🇦🌻 (@strictlychristo.bsky.social) 3:40 PM · Jul 11, 2026

Hell, it’s difficult to even succinctly report just how many have been killed by federal immigration agents over the course of the second Trump administration, with significantly different data appearing across differing sources, even media outlets of generally high standards. Look at an outlet like the New York Times, which says “at least 21 people have been shot at by federal immigration agents since last year” and provides a list, but then leaves multiple confirmed deaths off that list, like that of Keith Porter in Los Angeles, or Isaias Sanchez Barboza in Rio Grande City, Texas. In other instances, the involvement of ICE in a death has been unreported or actively hidden, like in the case of American citizen Ruben Ray Martinez, who was also slain by an ICE bullet behind the wheel of a car in March of 2025, but the involvement of federal immigration agents wasn’t known until early 2026. How many in total have been killed, or wounded, or fired upon? We don’t know.

Mother of Ruben Ray Martinez, U.S. citizen killed by ICE, speaks out : NPR share.google/OpULb0LAt2XI…

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— Linda (@rippleeffect74.bsky.social) 10:35 PM · Jul 9, 2026

Given all that, it’s little wonder that even the blockheaded likes of Markwayne Mullin can look at the situation in front of them and see that ICE agents and vehicle stops are a recipe that consistently results in damaging headlines for the Trump administration, given that in the post-Kristi Noem era, DHS has clearly been tasked with keeping any more Alex Pretti-type stories from hitting the front page. It’s not that they’re against people ending up dead, of course—a few deaths here and there is good for intimidation, in the hopes that a brutal immigration enforcement apparatus can force a significant number of immigrants in America into self-deportation. It’s that they don’t want people ending up dead quite so publicly, in full view of bystanders who might come forward with footage to illuminate yet another incident where a federal agent hasn’t bothered to wear their required camera. Video evidence is so very messy to deal with, after all—better that the bullets fly farther away from prying eyes.

Anyone want to take bets on how long this pause in ICE vehicle stops will last, given that the U.S. news cycle lasts about 48 hours maximum at this point? Do we think that’s enough time to take every ICE agent aside and remind them that everybody behind the wheel of a car is a human being—the kind of human that might get spooked by being swarmed by unmarked cars and masked agents? Could the sociopaths drawn to this line of work even learn that lesson if given years of additional “training”? Somehow, I doubt it.