ICE announced today that it’s temporarily suspending vehicle stops nationwide. According to an email obtained by The Atlantic, ICE official Liana Castano told top supervisors across the country that, “effective immediately,” vehicle stops were “suspended until further notice.”
The directive came down late Monday night, hours after ICE agents fatally shot Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, 25, in Biddeford, Maine; the second time in a week that agents killed a man during a vehicle stop who wasn’t their intended target.
The first was Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, gunned down near downtown Houston. Two botched stops resulting in two funerals. And, apparently, one very belated realization inside DHS that maybe, just maybe, agents shooting the wrong guy through a car window is a pattern worth addressing.
Except it’s not really a suspension, not in the way that word usually works. There’s an exception built right into Castano’s email. ICE can still run vehicle stops when it’s working jointly with other police agencies going after criminal suspects. ABC News reported a slightly different version of the carve-out, describing an allowance for “the most dangerous targets,” with everyone else getting picked up on foot after they leave home or work.
Whether those are two versions of the same policy or two different policies entirely, the upshot is the same. This isn’t ICE stepping back from pulling guns on people in cars; it’s ICE narrowing the list of situations where it’s willing to admit doing so out loud. A real change in behavior doesn’t come with asterisks attached the same day it’s announced.
This whole announcement was set in motion by a phone call, not a moral reckoning. Senator Susan Collins says she personally called DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin the night of the Biddeford shooting and told him to knock it off with “non-urgent” vehicle stops.
Mullin, for his part, had told his own confirmation hearing back in March that he didn’t want DHS generating the kind of controversy that came out of the Minneapolis ICE crackdown. So the man in charge already knew this exact scenario was a live risk, said so under oath, and let it happen twice in the same week anyway. It took a Republican senator from Maine picking up the phone before anything moved.
When asked to explain the change, ICE gave reporters this line, word for word, to both Axios and The Atlantic: “We are always evaluating our procedures to keep our officers safe and criminals off our streets. We will not disclose or discuss law enforcement tactics.”
That’s not a statement; that’s a script. If ICE genuinely wants to keep criminals off the streets, might I suggest firing everyone currently on payroll who’s shot an unarmed civilian who wasn’t even the person they were looking for.
According to the New York Times, at least 22 people have been shot at by ICE agents since Trump returned to office, and six of them are dead, three of whom were U.S. citizens. Nearly all of those shootings happened during vehicle stops. As the Rolling Stones song goes, at least for ICE, every cop’s a criminal.
So what happens now, while vehicle stops are on ice, pun absolutely intended? ICE has reportedly been ramping arrests up to roughly 2,000 a day, nearly double what it was running in the spring, and a huge chunk of those arrests have come from unmarked cars pulling people over.
Take that tactic away, and agents still have quotas to hit, which means they’re going to lean harder on stopping people on foot after they leave their homes or workplaces. In other words, stop and frisk, but for anyone who looks like they might be undocumented. Because that’s never resulted in the shooting of an innocent civilian.
Also worth remembering, in case the phrase “suspended until further notice” didn’t already tip you off, this is temporary. Nobody at DHS has said vehicle stops are gone for good, just that agents are getting some additional training before they’re allowed back at it. Training on what, exactly?
That question brings me to the last piece of this. The Atlantic’s story on all this is headlined “The Shooter in Maine Was a New ICE Recruit.” I can’t read the full piece because I’m not about to hand The Atlantic money I don’t have. But if that headline holds up, I have to ask. What exactly is ICE teaching people in training?
Rookie cops on municipal police forces walk beats and work patrol cars every single day of the week, and there isn’t some epidemic of them shooting random civilians who happen to resemble a suspect on a warrant.
That’s the difference between an agency that trains its people to slow down and one that’s apparently handing guns to brand-new hires and pointing them at a car full of strangers.
(Sources)
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