BostonGlobe.com29%
ICE agents aren’t following rules in traffic stops, experts say 66%
By Emma Platoff88%
7/18/2026, 11:57:28 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 25 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Anecdotal, and Availability Heuristic, with Appeal to Authority as the most egregious example at 28.1% saturation with 293 hits. Analysis detected 1,755 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,041 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 59.7% and a BS Rank of 66% (7,575 of 21,886 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 65.40% of the article peer group.
ICE agents aren’t following rules in traffic stops, experts say
Two fatal shootings in one week have brought fresh scrutiny to ICE tactics during vehicle stops
ICE’s mission has long been controversial.
But after agents killed two people in their cars over just one week, law enforcement professionals and career experts are raising a more fundamental concern about the agency’s tactics: Immigration agents do not follow standard, consensus policing protocols, including the agency’s own policy on traffic stops.
“They don’t know what they’re doing,” said Sean Smoot, who chairs the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board, citing videotaped examples of ICE bungling traffic stops in the last year and a half.
“If they don’t know what the rules are, and they aren’t well-trained, we’re setting them up for disaster.”
In the case of the shooting on Monday in Biddeford, Maine, “it appears that deadly force was used to prevent the escape of a fleeing subject, and that’s just simply a direct violation of the Department of Homeland Security’s own policy,” said Smoot, who served on a presidential task force on 21st century policing.
Within the space of six days, ICE agents shot and killed two people — 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and 26-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford — when they tried to stop them in their vehicles.
Including those two cases, ICE agents have been involved in at least 17 shootings involving cars in 18 months, according to a review by The Washington Post.
In another case in Minnesota, a US citizen, Renee Good, was shot dead in her car during a surge in ICE arrests in the area.
In Biddeford, an ICE vehicle rammed into Durán Guerrero’s car, apparently to stop it, as it repeatedly circled an intersection Monday morning.
Officers conducting vehicle stops should do so in clearly identified cars, experts also said, so that drivers know they are being stopped by law enforcement and not a thief.
ICE routinely employs plainclothes agents driving unmarked cars; in footage of the fatal shooting in Houston this month, ICE agents appear to follow Araujo in a Jeep Grand Cherokee and a Nissan Pathfinder without lights, sirens, or any identifying markings.
The most recent shootings seemed to spark a momentary reckoning at the highest levels of immigration enforcement.
Earlier this week, Trump administration officials told ICE to suspend most vehicle stops.
In an interview on Fox Tuesday night, Border czar Tom Homan characterized it as a “short pause.”
“I’m confident that ICE is well-trained in vehicle stops, and you’re going to see us keep moving forward,” Homan said.
But early Wednesday morning, President Trump took to social media to direct federal agents to return to the practice.
“We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!”
Trump wrote.
Some law enforcement officials said a lengthier review is warranted.
“It’s very clear that there’s a problem,” said John Sandweg, a former acting director of ICE.
“There is absolutely more than enough of a pattern here to say we need to pause these, limit them only to those kinds of exigent circumstances, and take a deeper dive into this.”
Ryan Schwank, an attorney who worked at ICE’s training academy in Georgia, pointed to insufficient training.
“Something has gone seriously wrong with the way agents are handling vehicle stops,” said Schwank, who came forward as a whistleblower after resigning from the agency earlier this year.
The pause this week, he added, was “a strong indicator that the agency itself recognizes that something is wrong, even if they won’t say so publicly.”
Experts also said the behavior shown in videos of ICE shootings shows more training is needed.
“What they’re doing is kind of basic stuff that even someone on their first day out of the police academy is not going to do,” said Tom Nolan, a former Boston police lieutenant and criminology professor.
Nolan said he has reviewed videos of incidents when ICE agents put themselves in “tactical jeopardy,” such as a case last September in Chicago when officers held onto and reached into a vehicle during a traffic stop.
When the driver tried to flee, an ICE agent fired two shots, killing him.
“You’re trained never to do that — never to put your head or your torso or your arms into a vehicle in which the engine was running,” Nolan said.
“We see agents consistently placing themselves in danger, placing themselves in harm’s way that necessitate them responding in the ways that we’ve seen them respond, that result in deadly force incidents.”
In Boston recently, a police officer was charged with manslaughter for his handling of a traffic stop in which he shot a carjacking suspect who was attempting to flee.
Nicholas O’Malley has pleaded not guilty and told investigators he believed his partner was in danger of being run over.
But prosecutors say he was not justified.
Massachusetts law and Boston Police Department policy forbid officers from shooting at a moving vehicle unless there’s no other way to prevent “imminent harm to a person.”
“Mr.
O’Malley was not acting in reasonable defense of either himself, the other officer, or the general public,” Suffolk Assistant District Attorney Ian Polumbaum said earlier this year.
Law enforcement experts emphasized that sometimes, during a potentially precarious situation such as a traffic stop, it’s OK to skip making an arrest, particularly if the person being targeted is not expected to commit immediate violence.
An officer shouldn’t launch a risky high-speed chase, for example, to arrest someone for tax fraud.
“Officers are trained to weigh the need for immediate apprehension against the risk to everyone involved,” said Dennis Kenney, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
That same logic applies to making arrests in immigration cases when the people are not accused of violent felonies, he said.
In the case of Durán Guerrero in Maine, Senator Angus King said he was not even ICE’s intended target, and his family has said he had work authorization.
“Even if they were in the country illegally,” Kenney said, “the need to apprehend is extremely low.”
Anjali Huynh and Tal Kopan of the Globe staff contributed reporting.
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