ICE

NY Times -  - The Trump administration has ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to halt most vehicle stops while carrying out operations across the country, according to people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly about the directive.

The order comes after ICE officers killed two people over the past week in Houston and the coastal city of Biddeford, Maine, amid a recent surge in immigration arrests. Both were shot after agents tried to stop their vehicles, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

The pause on vehicle stops could hamper the agency's ability to increase arrests as it faces increasing pressure to deliver on the president's promise of mass deportations. But it comes as some influential lawmakers and state officials have demanded answers about the latest shootings.

Robert Reich -  From early 2025 through mid-2026, federal immigration agents have fired on more than 20 people, many of whom were shot in their vehicles. At least seven of these people died. In some cases, video evidence has undermined the accounts initially provided by federal officials.

Over the same period of time, more than 50 people have died in ICE custody, often because authorities refused to treat acute medical conditions.

The Guardian -   It’s been a brutal tactic deployed by local and federal law enforcement officials time and again over the past year: using teargas, rubber bullets and pepper spray to control protests outside ICE detention centers or during enforcement operations.

Now, a new report lays bare the scale of the use of these crowd control weapons during anti-immigration demonstrations across the US, including hundreds of incidents that resulted in lasting and traumatic injuries.

The report and an interactive map was created by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley (HRC) and released this week. Doctors and human rights experts with PHR and HRC documented 412 verified incidents of the “misuse” of these crowd control weapons, also known as “less-lethal weapons”, from June 2025 through May 2026.

“This is a concerning story,” said Dr Rohini Haar, the lead author of the report and a PHR medical expert, in an interview with the Guardian.

The report documented 203 injuries stemming from the alleged misuse of the crowd control weapons. Some of the injuries included blindings, traumatic brain injuries, lacerations, fractures and contusions.

The researchers struggled to confirm the full scale of the injuries, because “visual investigative techniques cannot adequately assess invisible injuries, such as chemical injury or chronic pain or hearing loss”. 

“The true number of injuries is likely far greater,” the report adds.

Time -   When he took over as Homeland Security Secretary in March, Markwayne Mullin was intent on directing the agency toward a quieter approach to immigration enforcement. 

The aim was to take Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) out of the headlines after a scandal-plagued year for the agency that culminated in a widely criticized and deadly enforcement surge in Minnesota.

Highly publicized surges into cities were stopped, as was an accelerated training program for new ICE officers that critics said was sending inadequately trained agents onto the streets. 

But arrests continued apace, and two fatal shootings by ICE agents within six days now threaten to create a new groundswell of opposition to President Donald Trump’s already unpopular mass deportation agenda.

The circumstances in the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by ICE agents in Houston on July 7 are strikingly similar to previous fatal shootings. The 52-year-old builder and father of three was on his way to work when he was pursued by federal agents. ICE said Araujo, a Mexican national, ignored commands and attempted to ram an agent, who fired his weapon in self-defense.

As in the killing of Renee Good, the ICE account of the shooting has been disputed by witnesses, who said there was no agent in front of the car at the time of the shooting, and that the fatal shots came from the side of the vehicle...

On Monday, a 26-year-old native of Colombia who was not the target of a warrant was killed by a federal immigration agent in Biddeford, Maine. Maine Immigrants' Rights Coalition, a local advocacy group, said the man was authorized to work in the U.S. 

Mullin may have kept ICE out of the news for a while, but the arrests did not stop. More than 10,000 people were arrested in a five-day surge by ICE at the end of June.