For one night, ICE's own leadership treated its deadly vehicle stops as the emergency its critics say they are. Late on July 14, 2026, hours after agents in Maine killed Joan Sebastian Guerrero, the second person in a week shot dead during a stop who was not the person agents were looking for, ICE official Liana Castano emailed top supervisors nationwide: “Effective immediately, vehicle stops are suspended until further notice.” The Atlantic called it an extraordinary directive: officers, who have been making roughly 2,000 arrests a day, many via stops from unmarked cars, were told to stand down except when working with other police agencies on criminal suspects.
Trump overrode it the next morning. On Truth Social he declared that ICE agents are “doing a GREAT job,” insisted “we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.'s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” and told the agency to “go back and do your very important job.”
By then a third person was dead in eight days. In Houston on July 7, an ICE officer shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who was not the operation's target. In Biddeford, Maine, on July 13, an agent shot Guerrero, who was not the warrant's target either. And in Florida, a man fleeing immigration officers was struck and killed by a semi-truck during the pursuit.
The sequence is the entry's point: confronted with a tactic that had just produced two mistaken-identity killings, the agency's professionals paused it, and the president ordered it back within hours, praising the agents involved. The deaths are documented in the pattern entry; the decision to resume was Trump's own (see ICE Agents Shot and Killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Houston Father of Three Driving to a Construction Job After 35 Years in the Country, ICE Agents in Maine Fatally Shot a 26-Year-Old Colombian Worker, the Second 'Wrong Man' Killing in a Week and Federal Immigration Officers Have Fatally Shot at Least 10 People Since Trump's Second Term Began).