Trump Orders ICE Back to Vehicle Stops One Day After Agency Paused Them

After shootings tied to ICE vehicle-stop enforcement in Texas and Maine, President Trump has ordered the agency to reverse a pause on the practice.

ICE had paused vehicle stops agency-wide, according to three Department of Homeland Security sources who spoke to the Daily Wire, which first reported the halt on Tuesday. A directive to field offices reportedly read simply: "no more vehicle stops for now."

That pause lasted less than a day. Trump posted on Truth Social Wednesday morning, telling ICE to get back to work.

"The Open Border Policy of Sleepy Joe Biden allowed 25,000,000 people to pour into our Country, unchecked and unvetted," Trump wrote. "Many were Criminals, and we have to get them out. In order to do this, we must be strong, tough, and smart, and we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.'s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!"

He added that abandoning the stops would hand a win to "the radical Left" and told agents to "be judicious, fair and smart, and go back and do your very important job." He closed with a message to the agency: "Keep those Crime Stat Records coming! Remember, you are loved and respected in America."

Why the pause happened at all

The stops were suspended after shootings tied to vehicle-stop enforcement in Texas and Maine, including the case of a 26-year-old Colombian man that DHS said "attempted to flee" and left the arresting officer "fearing for public safety."

Border czar Tom Homan told Fox News on Tuesday that the pause was meant to be "short term," framed around retraining rather than a policy retreat. "I think what they're doing is taking the pause to make sure that, number one, the ICE officers have everything they need to stay safe because vehicle attacks are up 3,400%, and they're going to make sure, is the training sufficient? Did anything go wrong? I'm confident they're going to get back to their policy of vehicle stops," Homan said. He predicted agents would be back to vehicle stops soon regardless of what Trump said publicly.

Homan's 3,400% figure on vehicle attacks against ICE officers has not been independently broken down with a baseline number in available reporting, so it is not clear how large the underlying raw count is. It is presented here as Homan's claim, not a verified statistic.

Why agents wanted the stops back

Multiple ICE officers were reportedly unhappy about the pause, according to the Daily Wire's agency sources, because vehicle stops let them make arrests away from private homes. Home arrests require a judicial warrant and put agents in situations where a target may have more access to weapons. One agency source put it bluntly: "Numbers are going down, we can't do sh*t."

If the administration's stated goal is mass deportation enforcement, and vehicle stops are how a large share of arrests happen, then a pause directly cuts into arrest numbers the administration is publicly tracking and touting.

The counterargument the reversal skips past

The strongest case against snapping straight back to the old policy is one Homan himself gestured at before Trump overruled the pause: officers may not have had time to determine whether training or protocol changes were actually needed following the Texas and Maine shootings. A one-day pause is not much runway to audit tactics or retrain agents on when deadly force is and isn't justified during a fleeing-vehicle scenario.

There is no indication in available reporting that any internal review of the Maine or Texas shootings was completed before Trump's order went out. No investigation into either shooting has been publicly announced as concluded, and no charges have been filed against any officer involved as of this writing.

What's unresolved

Homan said the pause would let ICE confirm officers "have everything they need to stay safe" and that training would be assessed for gaps. Trump's Wednesday order effectively short-circuits that review timeline, whatever it was going to look like. Whether ICE conducts any retraining before agents resume stops, or simply reverts to prior practice immediately, is not yet known. Neither DHS nor ICE has released a public statement laying out specific safety protocol changes tied to the reversal.

The question remains: does going back to vehicle stops without a completed safety review reduce or increase the odds of another fatal encounter. No source in this reporting answers that, because no completed review has been made public.