At least 10 people have been killed during immigration operations since the start of the Trump administration's mass deportation campaign, including four during vehicle stops.
US President Donald Trump said Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should continue traffic stops after recent fatal shootings, appearing to contradict a new policy halting the practice.
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Trump wrote on his social media site early on Wednesday that ICE is “doing a GREAT job, one that has to be done.”
The President says to remove criminals he says were let into the country under the previous Democratic administration “we must be strong, tough and smart and we CANNOT give up one of ICE’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” Trump says.
“Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands.”
On Tuesday, ICE suspended the use of traffic stops to detain immigrants after two fatal shootings by ICE agents, according to media reports.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) instructed ICE officers not to stop moving vehicles to arrest or question the occupants inside, according to the Wall Street Journal and other outlets.
The policy change came after an ICE officer fatally shot Colombian driver Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Maine on Monday and another motorist in Houston last week, renewing criticism of the agency's tactics.
Colombian leader Gustavo Petro, a harsh critic of President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, called the killing a "murder of a Latin American Colombian at the hands of the US government."
"They killed him because they believed he was an inferior being without rights," Petro wrote on X.
In Florida on Tuesday, a 28-year-old man died after being hit by a truck while fleeing immigration and other federal officers, the third such death in about a week.
US Senator Susan Collins said she had urged DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin “to cease all non-urgent vehicle stops.”
John Sandweg, who served as acting ICE director during the Obama administration, has recently estimated that there have been around 18 traffic-stop shootings during Trump's immigration crackdown.
The deaths have renewed criticism of ICE's enforcement tactics, which were widely condemned last winter after the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minnesota.