President Trump woke up this morning with an urgent message for Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers deployed on U.S. streets: They were to pay no mind to the internal memo, issued barely a day earlier, telling them to suspend vehicle stops amid a public outcry over two fatal shootings by ICE officers in less than a week. Trump was issuing his own orders.
“We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!,” the president wrote on his Truth Social network. “Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands.”
The president overruled his own administration after getting furious pushback from his MAGA base over the ICE order suspending most vehicle stops. White House officials told us that Trump had heard a litany of complaints from hard-line allies over the past day. The final straw, one official and one outside adviser told us, was the cable-news segments that Trump watched this morning. The negative coverage from right-wing media was accompanied by a torrent of public and private criticism from figures including the MAGA influencer Tomi Lahren, former Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino, and the War Room podcaster Steve Bannon. Trump, one official told us, ultimately concluded that ICE abandoning traffic stops now would “make them all look weak.”
The freeze on vehicle stops came late Monday on orders from Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who had spoken with Senator Susan Collins of Maine after an ICE officer fatally shot 26-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a delivery driver from Colombia, in the town of Biddeford. The officer who shot Guerrero in the head was a new recruit who had joined ICE earlier this year after working as a police officer at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Senior officials at ICE have told us that officers aren’t getting enough training in how to conduct vehicle stops and safely de-escalate confrontations when drivers don’t obey commands.
Collins, a Republican running for reelection, said yesterday that the Department of Homeland Security had agreed to halt nonurgent stops, and she urged DHS to expedite the delivery of body-worn cameras to ICE officers. Six days earlier, an ICE officer in Texas had killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a construction contractor from Mexico who’d been living in the United States for 35 years. Neither Salgado Araujo nor Guerrero had criminal records, according to publicly available sources, and neither was the target of the stop that led to their death.
[Read: Another fatal ICE shooting]
Today’s reversal marked an embarrassing turnabout for Mullin, who took over DHS in March, two months after a pair of U.S. citizens were killed by immigration officers in Minneapolis. Officials we spoke with at DHS and ICE told us that it was highly unlikely that Mullin would have allowed the initial order halting vehicle stops to be sent without getting approval from the White House. “Not a chance,” one DHS official told us. “Someone got into the big boss’s ear. Three-ring circus.” But a senior administration official denied that anyone at the White House had signed off on the pause in advance and told us that Trump hadn’t known about it.
The backlash over the pause on traffic stops caught some in the White House off guard. Trump himself was spared a large portion of the blame from the right, and MAGA critics instead blamed others in the administration for supposedly failing to serve him properly. Mullin received much of the anger, picking up the nickname “Kung Fu Plumber” in influential MAGA text chains and some corners of social media, two outside Trump advisers told us. (Mullin owns a plumbing-and-HVAC business and is a former mixed-martial-arts fighter.) One outside adviser told us that key voices in Trump’s orbit attacked Mullin as “soft” and an “appeaser” of ICE opponents.
After Trump’s Truth Social post, Mullin posted a statement to social media that lacked any instruction and did not directly address Trump’s countermand. Mullin’s statement said that the department’s top goal “is to keep our officers safe and get criminals OFF our streets.” He added that “we remind illegal aliens attempting to evade arrest is dangerous.” As of this afternoon, ICE had not formally issued new orders reversing the vehicle-stop memo, according to officials we spoke with.
“President Trump and I are on the same page,” Mullin said in a statement sent to us by DHS in response to our questions. “We want our ICE officers to have all options available to keep them safe while executing our mission of deporting as many illegal alien criminals from our country as possible.”
The 1985 Supreme Court decision in Tennessee v. Garner established that police officers cannot use lethal force on a suspect for disobeying commands or attempting to flee. An officer must be able to articulate a well-reasoned fear of imminent harm to police or the public to justify opening fire. A driver who accelerates aggressively toward an officer would present a threat, but one trying to swerve around officers to escape would not alone meet that threshold.
In Trump’s first term, he was often susceptible to criticism from the right. More than once—and most famously during the 2018 budget standoff—he backed away from a deal after being attacked by Republicans on Fox News. In his second term, Trump has more often than not given the right what it wants, allowing himself fewer opportunities to be outflanked. But after riding high during Trump’s first months of this term, some in the MAGA base have grown frustrated by the president’s inability to make good on campaign promises—and by his decision to launch a war in Iran that has turned into a quagmire.
Ever since the administration pulled back on its most aggressive immigration-enforcement actions following the January killings in Minneapolis, key MAGA voices have urged a return to more forceful tactics as a way to restore the base’s faith. Some officials, including the “border czar” Tom Homan, have lately promoted an intensifying deportation push, even as some in the West Wing have privately worried about the potential for violent incidents that could be politically damaging. The new deaths have revived those fears.
In recent weeks, the administration ramped up ICE arrests to nearly 2,000 a day, doubling the pace of this spring. ICE officers have come to rely on traffic stops to grab people as they leave for work in the morning, because unlike with arrests that are carried out inside homes, they don’t need a warrant from a judge. Now they’ll be able to resume those stops—which will likely allow the arrest numbers to continue to climb but also risk more killings like the ones in Texas and Maine.
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