Giving people a route to sue federal immigration officials for violations of their constitutional rights is a means by which Congress can push back against a wayward agency and demand accountability.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin issued an order directing the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to temporarily pause vehicle stops on Tuesday, following two deadly shootings within a single week.
The Department of Homeland Security had initially advertised that the measure would remain in place until ICE personnel received further training on how to conduct vehicle stops, CBS News reported. However, some carve-outs exist: “ICE will continue performing vehicle stops only for the most egregious targets with serious or violent criminal histories,” Fox News noted.
Critics of the abrupt policy shift argue that it will dampen ICE’s rate of arrests and removals, which surged to more than 10,000 in just five days at the end of June. President Donald Trump challenged the order on Wednesday, describing traffic stops as “one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools.” He took to Truth Social to demand that ICE “go back and do your very important job,” saying the policy backed by the “Radical Left Dumocrats” would not occur on his watch, seemingly reversing the pause on vehicle stops.
But several conservatives back the halt on vehicle stops, including border czar Tom Homan, who told Fox News he is confident the change will eventually enhance officer training and outcomes without reducing ICE arrests. Those wary of Trump’s immigration crackdown likewise support the moratorium and have urged more limits and greater accountability for immigration agents’ controversial enforcement methods in the aftermath of the two killings.
The DHS has asserted that the officers involved in the shootings feared for their lives in both the Houston, Texas, and Biddeford, Maine episodes, but eyewitness testimony has complicated this narrative. In Houston, passengers in the vehicle driven by 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo challenge ICE’s version of events. “There was never a moment when an ICE agent stood directly in front of the vehicle,” said Hugo Balderas, the attorney for two of the three occupants, to Houston Public Media. In Maine, one witness told CBS News he heard 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero say, “I tried to stop,” as officers pulled him from the car shortly after the shooting.
There is no video evidence to corroborate either stop, despite former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem expanding the nationwide body camera program in early February after the killings of Alex Pretti and Renée Good. More than five months later, the agency has yet to implement a standard policing technology—particularly troubling given the combined $240 billion immigration-enforcement budget through May, including $20 million earmarked to outfit agents with body cameras. Nonetheless, the DHS has recently renewed its commitment in response to the most recent fatal shootings.
According to an email statement from Mike Fox, a legal fellow in the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice, “in both fatal shootings…agents used excessive force, proving that the [DHS’] robust use-of-force policy is virtually meaningless to the extent its agents are free to violate it with impunity.”
Since President Trump took office in January 2025, the DHS and its affiliated agencies have been accused of more than just bending their use-of-force guidelines. In the middle of a recruitment push to hire more than 12,000 new officers, the agencies have faced allegations of not only employing excessive force against undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens but also making arrests without probable cause in violation of federal law, and repeatedly disregarding court orders related to unlawful detentions. Earlier this year, a leaked ICE memo indicated the agency had secretly adopted a policy permitting immigration agents to forcibly enter homes without first obtaining a judicial warrant, contradicting prior training and Fourth Amendment protections.
“Because the [DHS] has repeatedly demonstrated its inability to comply with the letter and spirit of the law,” Fox argues, temporary pauses and internal guidelines, such as the vehicle-stops halt or Noem’s commitment to body cameras, are “entirely insufficient.”
“It is now the responsibility of Congress to intervene and clearly legislate when, where, and whether [federal] immigration enforcement agents…should be permitted to conduct traffic stops,” he continued.
Trump relieved Noem of her duties earlier this year amid mounting concerns about her performance and appointed Mullin as her successor. Yet Mullin’s efforts to pursue a more restrained approach to immigration enforcement have not been enough for the agency to outrun what Fox characterizes as a “deep-seated crisis of federal accountability.”
Although the temporary pause on vehicle stops “will undoubtedly save lives, and additional training is a welcome step,” Fox notes, it will not resolve the underlying problem.
“Genuine reform requires Congress to address the Bivens Act… and to pursue a broad abolition of qualified immunity,” he adds. Such changes would enable individuals to sue federal officials who infringe upon their constitutional rights, including officers who employ excessive force.
“True justice and systemic transformation cannot be achieved through ephemeral agency memos,” Fox concludes, “but only through permanent legislative safeguards that subject federal officers to real, external accountability.”
