(CNN) — It was the problem that installing a new top official at the Department of Homeland Security was supposed to solve.
Support for the Trump administration’s intense focus on immigration enforcement was falling early this year after high-profile operations resulted in controversial deportations, violent confrontations with protesters and, ultimately, two US citizens shot to death in January on the streets of Minneapolis.
“My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day,” the incoming DHS secretary, Markwayne Mullin, told a congressional panel in mid-March.
Although there are two months left to go on that self-imposed deadline, Mullin’s hope for a quiet summer of inconspicuous immigration arrests has been foiled by another pair of fatal shootings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents under his broad command.
The killings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Joan Sebastian Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, both came at the end of traffic stops, which had become a critical tool for agents trying to meet the Trump administration’s goal of around 2,000 arrests a day.
That seemed to change Tuesday as DHS faced more criticism from local officials and members of Congress: ICE agents were told to largely suspend vehicle stops until further notice and to coordinate with partner agencies when executing a criminal warrant on someone in a vehicle.
But border czar Tom Homan had barely finished a round of interviews downplaying the significance of those traffic stops and predicting the temporary change wouldn’t greatly impact the number of immigration-related arrests when the directive changed again.
The flip-flop came at the direction of President Donald Trump, a White House official said. The pause had made him furious, two sources familiar with the matter said, as prominent MAGA voices suggested his administration was weakening immigration enforcement.
“We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” Trump wrote Wednesday morning on Truth Social. “Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands.”
“I.C.E., be judicious, fair and smart, and go back and do your very important job,” he added.
However short-lived, ICE’s pause on most vehicle stops showed a federal agency apparently willing to reassess its methods, at least compared to the decision by Mullin’s predecessor, Kristi Noem, to double down after the deaths of Minnesotans Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal officers.
Within DHS, officials privately have shared concerns that repeated agency-involved firearm discharges – there have been 10 such incidents in 2026 – will derail the public sentiment Mullin has tried to rebuild on the heels of Noem’s ouster.
Still, the legal standard for charging law enforcement for a shooting in the line of duty remains high, and no criminal charges have been filed against any immigration enforcement officer involved in this year’s fatal traffic stop cases.
ICE now instituting more training, DHS says
Facing unprecedented arrest targets in Trump’s second term, ICE agents are under pressure to apprehend undocumented immigrants while on the move themselves, a former leader of the agency told CNN this week.
“It takes a little more time if you’re going to wait for the person to arrive at their destination,” said John Sandweg, an attorney and former acting director of ICE in the Obama administration. “There’s just this desire to ratchet up the arrest numbers.”
Meanwhile, traditional efforts to take undocumented immigrants into custody from their homes have become less effective. Surveilling neighborhoods, door knocking and using DHS administrative warrants – signed by authorized ICE officers rather than judges – have been frustrated by expanding networks of community organizers who inform immigrants of their legal rights and warn them when federal agents are nearby.
“More and more people are educated that they’re not required as a matter of law to let ICE in without a judicial warrant,” Sandweg said, referring to the kind signed by a judge.
ICE’s ramp-up in pulling over drivers for immigration enforcement purposes, however, hasn’t come with an increase in training for how to conduct traffic stops, exacerbating the danger for both suspects and officers, he said.
“I talk to former ICE agents and state and local police all the time. They’ll tell you that a traffic stop is one of the most dangerous things law enforcement can do,” Sandweg said. “The officers feel like they are at risk, and we see the consequences of that.”
Indeed, even as ICE officers already received far less training than almost any other federal agents given a badge and a gun, the Trump administration cut ICE recruits’ training hours amid an aggressive hiring push.
Mullin has since reversed that, promising in a congressional hearing last month that training would be “back up to the regular standards” by July 1.
ICE is instituting additional training, including for crowd control, high-risk vehicle stops and medical training, plus a live-fire cover course, a DHS spokesperson told CNN on Wednesday.
On June 2, ICE reextended its training program to 71 days, which applied to all new training classes beginning July 1, the spokesperson said, adding previous graduates will get “follow-on training.”
“As we have said all along, ICE training does not end when recruits graduate from the academy,” the DHS spokesperson said. “ICE officers go through a rigorous on-the-job training and mentorship. This additional training is tracked online and monitored closely.”
Justifying force amid traffic stops
Other vehicle-related arrests also have drawn negative attention to immigration enforcement actions. An ICE arrest a month ago in the parking lot of a Baltimore elementary school shocked parents and children preparing nearby for a kindergarten promotion ceremony. And crashes involving fleeing suspects or protesters accused of “ramming” agents have been caught on video.
Under DHS’ use of force policy, a law enforcement officer, or LEO, is only allowed to use deadly force “when the LEO has a reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury to the LEO or to another person.”
In the killings amid traffic stops of Good in Minneapolis and Salgado Araujo in Houston, ICE claimed the suspects had used their vehicles as weapons against officers – assertions denied by passengers in Salgado Araujo’s van and contradicted by video of Good’s shooting.
But after Monday’s fatal shooting of Durán Guerrero in Maine, ICE’s official statement took a notably different tack: “The vehicle attempted to flee the scene and fearing for public safety an officer discharged his weapon,” it read.
Even so, that explanation by DHS has left some public officials and law enforcement veterans uncertain about why the officer fired his weapon, they told CNN.
“This vague idea of public safety without more is not sufficient to justify … deadly force,” said Elliot Williams, a CNN Legal Analyst who served at ICE during the Obama administration.
“Every law enforcement officer in America is scratching their head trying to figure out what that means,” a federal law enforcement source told CNN, stressing an investigation – including from the officer’s vantage point – must be done to understand what happened.
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