WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is calling on Immigration and Customs Enforcement to keep conducting traffic stops, a stance that appears to directly contradict a newly announced policy suspending the practice following several fatal shootings.
Early Wednesday, Trump posted on his social media platform that ICE is “doing a GREAT job, one that has to be done.”
The president, a Republican, argued that in order to remove individuals he claims were allowed into the country under the previous Democratic administration, authorities must remain aggressive. “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 wrote, adding, “Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands.”
The policy shift came after an ICE officer fatally shot a Colombian driver on Monday in Maine — just one week after another officer shot and killed a motorist in Houston. Those incidents reignited criticism of the agency’s enforcement methods, which had already drawn widespread condemnation last winter following the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minnesota.
Then on Tuesday in Florida, a third person died in roughly a week during a confrontation with immigration officers. Authorities said a 28-year-old man was struck and killed by a tractor trailer while fleeing from immigration and other federal officers.
A troubling pattern has emerged throughout the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown: federal officers stop drivers and later report that they fired their weapons because a vehicle posed an immediate threat. This is happening despite decades of warnings from law enforcement experts that shooting at moving vehicles creates its own serious dangers and should almost always be avoided.
At least ten people have lost their lives during immigration enforcement operations since the administration’s mass deportation effort began. At least four of those deaths involved individuals in vehicles. The trend alarmed U.S. Sen. Susan Collins enough that she said Tuesday she personally urged DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin “to cease all non-urgent vehicle stops.”
John Sandweg, who served as acting director of ICE — an agency within DHS — during the Obama administration, recently estimated that approximately 18 traffic-stop shootings have occurred during the current immigration crackdown.
