By Aleksandra Michalska and Kristina Cooke
BIDDEFORD, Maine, July 14 (Reuters) – The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has ordered its officers to suspend most vehicle stops around the country, after agents fatally shot two men six days apart during traffic stops in Texas and Maine, officials said on Tuesday.
The shift in arrest tactics, which President Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan called a “temporary pause” in vehicle stops, was implemented one day after an ICE agent killed a driver from Colombia in the coastal Maine town of Biddeford, about 15 miles (24 km) south of Portland.
On July 7 an ICE officer in Houston fatally shot a Mexican national while trying to stop his vehicle.
Although both the men shot were characterized by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, parent agency of ICE, as being “illegal aliens,” DHS officials have acknowledged neither was the intended target of deportation operations that led to their deaths.
No video footage of either shooting has surfaced, and federal authorities have offered no evidence to support contentions that either man posed a threat to ICE agents or the public at large justifying the use of lethal force to stop them.
The back-to-back incidents brought to at least seven the number of people shot dead during immigration enforcement operations since January 2025, when Trump returned to office and launched a campaign of mass deportations.
Since the beginning of June, ICE arrests in Maine have more than quadrupled to around 70 per day in early July, according to internal ICE data shared with Reuters by a source.
The shooting in Maine sparked immediate protests on Monday, and further demonstrations were taking place on Tuesday in Maine, Boston and Houston.
‘SHORT-TERM REVIEW’
“It’s not a policy change, it’s a temporary pause,” Homan said of the vehicle-stop suspension in an interview on the Fox News Channel on Tuesday. “This is going to be a short-term review to make sure ICE agents are safe and doing the right thing.” In the meantime, he added, officers will exercise other options for making arrests.
DHS asserted in a statement nearly 12 hours after Monday’s shooting that an ICE officer “fearing for public safety” opened fire when the driver attempted to flee.
Officials have not explained how the driver might have posed a threat that would justify the shooting. According to ICE policy, deadly force should only be used when there is “imminent danger of serious bodily injury or death to the officer or to another person” and is not authorized “solely to prevent the escape of a fleeing suspect.”
‘UNCERTAIN FUTURE’
U.S. Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine who caucuses with the Democrats, told reporters the agents involved were not wearing body cameras.
DHS said the agents were surveilling the last known address of someone with a final order of removal from the country, and followed a car they saw departing the residence. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin later told King the driver of that car, the man killed in the shooting, was not the target of the operation, according to a spokesperson for the senator.
He was identified in a GoFundMe.com page set up for his family as 25-year-old Johan Sebastian Duran from Colombia, whose wife and 3-year-old daughter “now face an uncertain future without him,” according to the site.
Immigration advocates have said Duran was authorized to work in the U.S.
“He was killed because he was believed to be an inferior being with no rights,” Colombian President Gustavo Petro wrote on X, saying the country would pursue legal action.
WITNESSES TO THE TRAGEDY
Duran had worked two jobs, including as food delivery driver, according to the Portland Press Herald. His spouse and daughter witnessed the aftermath of the shooting and could be heard crying in the street, the newspaper reported, citing neighbors.
One eyewitness, Daniel Boucher, 71, told Reuters he heard what sounded like firecrackers on Monday morning, rushed to the window of his apartment and saw a white SUV ram a smaller white car. Boucher said he then saw an ICE officer pull the car’s driver, his face and head bloodied, from the car.
“I remember hearing the victim say, ‘But I tried to stop,'” Boucher said, before the man appeared to stop breathing.
The Maine attorney general’s office said it was investigating, along with other state, local and federal authorities.
HOUSTON SHOOTING
Six days earlier, an ICE agent in Houston’s heavily Hispanic East End fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52. Salgado was not the target of the operation, a DHS official has said.
ICE said in a statement that Salgado, a Mexican national living in the U.S. illegally for over three decades, rammed a law enforcement vehicle with his van and attempted to run down an officer who fired in self-defense.
The agency offered no evidence to support its account. In similar instances over the past year, initial ICE and DHS statements about the use of force have been contradicted by video footage or other evidence.
Three men who were riding in Salgado’s van have disputed ICE’s narrative, according to a lawyer for two of the men.
In a separate ICE-involved fatality on Tuesday in St. Augustine, Florida, a man was struck by a tractor-trailer truck and died while running from an “encounter” with federal immigration agents at a gasoline station parking lot, according to the state Highway Patrol.
The circumstances of his death and the events that preceded it remained unclear, and police did not respond to follow-up questions.
(Reporting by Aleksandra Michalska in Biddeford, Maine, and Kristina Cooke in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Helen Coster; Writing by Joseph Ax and Steve Gorman; Editing by Paul Thomasch, Alistair Bell, Mark Porter and Michael Perry)
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