Trump: ICE should continue traffic stops after recent shootings, seeming to contradict new policy

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump says Immigration and Customs Enforcement should continue traffic stops after recent fatal shootings, seeming to contradict a new policy to halt them.

Trump wrote early Wednesday on his social media site ICE is “doing a GREAT job, one that has to be done.”

The Republican president says to remove criminals he says were let into the country under the previous Democratic administration “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 says, “Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands.”

The policy change came after an ICE officer shot and killed a Colombian driver Monday in Maine and a week after one shot and killed a motorist in Houston, renewing criticism of the agency’s enforcement tactics that were widely condemned last winter after the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minnesota.

In Florida on Tuesday, a third man in roughly a week died during an encounter with immigration officers. This time, a 28-year-old man was killed after he was hit by a tractor trailer while running from immigration and other federal officers, authorities said.

It’s a narrative that has been repeated again and again since the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown began, with federal officers confronting drivers then saying they opened fire when their vehicles became a danger. That’s despite decades of warnings from policing experts that shooting into moving cars presents a danger of its own and should almost always be avoided.

At least 10 people have been killed during immigration operations since the start of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. At least four of those deaths involved people in vehicles, including one last week in Houston, a trend so troubling U.S. Sen. Susan Collins said Tuesday she urged DHS secretary Markwayne Mullin “to cease all non-urgent vehicle stops.”

John Sandweg, who was acting director at ICE, which is part of DHS, during the Obama administration, estimated recently that there have been roughly 18 traffic-stop shootings during the Trump immigration crackdown.