Internal orders handed down by leaders at U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement instructed officers in the field to stop making vehicle stops, according to five ICE officials around the country.
The directive, handed down in at least three of ICE’s administrative regions Monday and effective immediately, came after a pair of killings in Texas and Maine by ICE agents that involved attempts to stop cars.
The ICE officers who spoke with The Intercept, who asked for anonymity to discuss internal orders, said the shift was meant to mitigate the chances of shootings like the ones that sparked outrage by taking the lives of two immigrants over the past week.
“Whatever these chucklefucks did in Maine and Houston is serious.”
“We have been told to either grab them before they leave their parking spot, or follow them and arrest them where they stop (ie a gas station or place of work) to avoid these situations,” said an ICE official from the South.
“This shit isn’t normal,” the official said. “Whatever these chucklefucks did in Maine and Houston is serious.”
ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The five officials who spoke to The Intercept about the directive all hail from ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division, which carries out most of the federal government’s street immigration arrests. (ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, the agency’s criminal investigative arm, did not receive a directive about vehicle stops, according to two special agents.)
The directive to ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, which was first reported by the New York Times, didn’t come down as written orders, two of the ICE officials told The Intercept.
Instead, said one of the ICE officials who works in the Mountain West region, the order came down through field office directors to avoid red tape associated with putting an official policy in place.
Along with street arrests, vehicle stops had become go-to tactic for ICE in the second Trump administration, with ramped-up enforcement that has included crackdowns on large cities like Minneapolis. Under past administrations, including President Donald Trump’s first term, ICE relied mostly on transfers from local jails and prisons to satisfy its enforcement priorities.
The vehicle stops also contributed to a recent explosion of immigrant detentions, with ICE announcing roughly 10,000 arrests over a five-day period in late June 2026.
Ending the vehicle stops, said the ICE official based in the South, “definitely hinders enforcement.”
Killings in Vehicle Stops
In a recent period of less than a week, Mexican national Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot and killed by ICE officers in Houston and Colombian national Joan Sebastian Guerrero was shot and killed in Biddeford, Maine.
Details surrounding the shootings are still emerging, but Department of Homeland Security officials have said that neither Araujo nor Guerrero were the intended targets of the ICE enforcement operations that claimed their lives. The officers involved in the shootings were not wearing body cameras in either case.
The killings sparked public outrage and probes at both the state and local levels.
In addition to investigations by FBI and the Homeland Security Department’s Office of the Inspector General, Maine’s attorney general and the attorney general in Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston, launched investigations. Local police departments in both Maine and Texas are assisting with the investigations.
There are few precedents for ICE to cut off its enforcement division agencywide from using vehicle stops to make apprehensions.
As federal agents surged into mostly Democratic major cities, confrontations between ICE and demonstrators, activists, and immigrants led to violence — especially after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti during ICE’s Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis over the winter.
The outrage over the shootings led to operational guidance emphasizing de-escalation and reducing confrontations during field operations, with several field offices even briefly suspending proactive street enforcement or vehicle-stop tactics following orders of ICE upper management.
Since Operation Metro Surge’s end in mid-February, ICE has focused on smaller, decentralized “at-large” enforcement operations under the leadership of new Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, a strategy that has allowed ICE to, until recently, operate with a lower profile, while maintaining previous arrest quotas.
