ICE’s Liana Castano halts vehicle stops after two deadly shootings this month

Late last night, ICE official Liana Castano sent an email to top ICE supervisors nationwide: “Effective immediately,” she wrote, “vehicle stops are suspended until further notice.” The order came at the end of a day that began with the killing of a 26-year-old Colombian man in Maine, and it followed the second fatal shooting involving a vehicle stop in a week. Castano added exceptions for when ICE pursues criminal suspects in cooperation with other police agencies, but for officers operating on their own, the directive was blunt: stand down.

In the background is a policy bet that has been getting tested in real time, on public roads, with lethal consequences. ICE has been ramping up immigration arrests across the country to roughly 2,000 a day, nearly doubling the number of people it takes into custody compared with the spring. The mechanics of that surge matter because many arrests have been carried out during stops by ICE officers traveling in unmarked cars, a tactic that can raise the chance of panic when drivers decide they are being hunted rather than pulled over. Castano’s email, obtained by the reporter, instructed that “All personnel are instructed to prioritize other existing operational methods, outside of vehicle stops, to conduct immigration enforcement activities,” telling street-level officers to shift tactics immediately.

So what changed is not the mission. It’s the method. The decision to suspend vehicle stops was made by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, with backing from the acting director of ICE, David Venturella, according to a senior administration official who was not authorized to discuss internal deliberations. In his confirmation hearing in March for the top DHS job, Mullin said he did not want the department to generate as much controversy as it had during the ICE crackdown in Minneapolis that left two U.S. citizens dead. That history is not trivia. It is the political memory driving operational choices.

The Maine shooting that triggered the day’s endgame also included a key detail that complicates easy narratives: the officer involved was hired by ICE this year from the Department of Veterans Affairs Police, and the officer has worked in federal law enforcement since 2017, according to the senior official. The shooter in Maine has not been publicly identified, and neither has the shooter in Houston, where the earlier fatal ICE shooting occurred. Meanwhile, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the Republican running for reelection, said on social media that she spoke with Mullin last night and asked him to halt all nonurgent vehicle stops by ICE. DHS, when asked about the halt, said in a statement: “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.”

Why are vehicle stops such a flashpoint? Because ICE enforcement is now more dependent on traffic pulls than many of its historical patterns. Historically, ICE officers tried to make arrests by apprehending targets at home, but word has gotten out through social media and legal clinics that officers typically cannot enter homes without a search warrant from a judge. That has pushed ICE toward catching people as they get into cars and leave for work. The problem, as veteran officials and attorneys in the reporting describe it, is that traffic stops are where training, policy, and force decisions collide under stress.

The report ties that collision to two recent killings. In Houston, after the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by an ICE officer last Tuesday, seasoned officials at the agency said they were concerned about insufficient training and the lack of a vehicle-pursuit policy setting limits on the use of force during traffic stops. Araujo, a 52-year-old construction contractor who came from Mexico as a teenager and sent his three sons to college, had “weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer,” according to DHS. Officers involved in that killing were in the neighborhood looking for another man. In Biddeford, Maine, yesterday morning, the shooting also took the life of an immigrant father who was not ICE’s target. DHS said the 26-year-old, identified as Joan Sebastian Guerrero, was shot through his windshield by an officer “fearing for public safety” when Guerrero tried to drive away. No videos of the shootings have emerged to substantiate DHS’s claims, and the officers involved were not wearing body cameras, according to the department. There were widely circulated bystander videos and security-camera footage depicting the scene after the Maine shooting, and at least one ICE official who watched a video of the lead-up was troubled to see officers standing in each other’s “field of fire” and failing to give clear commands. Still, the exact sequence before the shooting remains unclear.

The FBI and DHS’s internal-affairs division are investigating both killings, which appear to involve victims who disobeyed officer commands and attempted to flee. Those actions, the reporting notes, would not by themselves authorize officers to use lethal force. Officers must show they fired because of a well-reasoned fear of imminent harm. That is the legal and operational line ICE officers have to walk, and vehicle stops force them to walk it quickly, in unpredictable situations.

The policy reversal also fits into a staffing and training acceleration that has been underway. The report says ICE has added nearly 8,000 new officers over the past nine months as part of a hiring spree meant to more than double the workforce. Many new hires were sent through a fast-track course that cut academy training time to just 42 days, less than half of a standard course. DHS reversed itself this spring and returned to the longer training regimen amid backlash to the ICE crackdown in Minneapolis. But veteran ICE officials told the reporter that officers receive less training in vehicle stops than most police departments do, and that Enforcement and Removal Operations, the branch that handles detention and deportation, lacks clear guidelines on the use of force involving vehicles. Undercover tactics add risk too: officers in unmarked cars are more likely to cause a driver to panic than a police officer in a car with sirens and flashing lights. The report describes that officers are trained to view vehicles as deadly weapons, but that does not automatically mean they can open fire when someone is attempting to drive away. Now, following two deadly shootings, it is effectively official policy to stop doing vehicle stops at least “until further notice.”

For executives, boards, and anyone tracking how high-tempo enforcement and rapid scaling affect risk, this story is a case study in second-order effects. When arrest targets rise and entry into homes becomes harder in practice, traffic stops become the high-throughput pathway. When the workforce is growing fast and policies and training for that specific tactic are uneven, the margin for error collapses. Castano’s email is an operational “freeze” in response to on-the-ground outcomes, and Mullin’s backing signals that the political and safety stakes are now being treated as immediate. The strategic implication is simple and uncomfortable: when organizations make their systems depend on a single, stress-heavy tactic, leadership has to match it with equally clear force standards, training depth, and accountability. Otherwise, the road becomes the courtroom, and every stop becomes a referendum.