Trump Overturns His Own DHS's Order Pausing ICE Traffic Stops After Two Deaths

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem ordered ICE to halt most agency-initiated vehicle stops this week, according to CBS News. The pause came after two fatal shootings by ICE officers in less than a week: 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston on July 7, and 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, six days later.

The directive told field offices to prioritize other enforcement methods and limited vehicle stops to cases involving criminal warrants coordinated with other agencies, according to inkl. DHS reportedly planned to keep the pause in place until officers got more training on how to conduct stops safely.

President Trump reversed the order Wednesday on Truth Social, calling traffic stops "one of I.C.E.'s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools." He wrote that ending the practice would mean "playing right into the criminal's hands" and blamed "Radical Left Dumocrats" for pushing the pause, according to Reason. He told officers to be "judicious, fair and smart" before ordering them back to work.

The White House later described the halted directive as an internal memo that got walked back quickly, not a formal policy reversal, according to inkl.

A Split on the Right

This wasn't a clean left-versus-right fight. Border czar Tom Homan told Fox News the pause was a short-term safety review, not a retreat. "This is going to be a short-term review to make sure ICE agents are safe and doing the right thing," Homan said, adding that officers had other ways to make arrests in the meantime. Homan told Fox he was confident the review would improve training without hurting ICE's overall numbers.

Critics of the pause, including some Trump allies, argued the timing was bad. ICE arrests had surged past 10,000 in a five-day stretch at the end of June, according to Reason, and any slowdown in vehicle stops threatened that pace. Trump's own intervention makes clear he sided with that view over his DHS chief's.

Senator Susan Collins of Maine had said she'd persuaded DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to pause the stops in the wake of the Biddeford shooting, a claim that circulated widely before Trump's reversal made it moot.

What Actually Happened in Houston and Maine

DHS says both shootings were self-defense. In Houston, the agency said Salgado rammed a law enforcement vehicle and tried to strike an officer with his van before the officer fired. In Maine, agents had been surveilling a home tied to someone with a final removal order and followed Durán Guerrero's car after it left the property.

Neither man was the intended target of the operation that led to his death, according to DHS.

But DHS has not released evidence backing its account in either case, according to inkl. Three men riding in Salgado's van dispute the government's version through Hugo Balderas, an attorney representing two of them. "They confirmed that at no point was there ever an ICE agent directly in front of the vehicle," Balderas told Houston Public Media. In Maine, a witness told CBS News he heard Durán Guerrero tell officers "I tried to stop" as he was pulled from the car after the shooting.

There's no video of either incident. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced a nationwide body camera expansion back in early February, after the killings of Alex Pretti and Renée Good prompted similar outrage. Five months later, according to Reason, the rollout still isn't complete, despite a combined $240 billion immigration enforcement budget as of May that includes $20 million earmarked specifically for body cameras.

DHS has renewed its promise to finish the rollout following the Houston and Biddeford shootings, according to a statement cited by Reason.

For defenders of ICE's tactics, the fair question is this: if officers genuinely acted in self-defense in both cases, body cameras would settle it instantly and protect the agents from unfounded accusations. The absence of footage doesn't prove wrongdoing. But it also means the public has to take DHS's word for it, against the word of eyewitnesses and a lawyer representing surviving passengers, in cases where a man is dead either way.

Congress has the power to force the issue by tying ICE's enforcement budget to a hard body-camera deadline instead of relying on DHS's internal promises. As of today, no such legislation has been introduced. Until footage exists, both the agency's version and its critics' version remain unprovable, and vehicle stops continue exactly as they did before the pause Noem ordered and Trump killed within a day.