As I noted yesterday, after the killings of Good and Pretti in Minneapolis last winter, ICE/DHS shifted strategy, trying to keep up the pace of arrests and predation, while also keeping it more under the radar. Then the recent push to up the number of daily arrests began to upset that apple cart with two brazen killings of two motorists in just one week. What was notable yesterday was that ICE didn’t use its standard excuse for killing a civilian — weaponized vehicles, an agent feeling his life was threatened. They simply said the agent shot Joan Sebastian Guerrero because of a vague belief he posed a danger to the community. This seemed odd since ICE has manufactured cover stories with abandon in the past. Why not now? And why go with an excuse that actually provides a much less robust defense in court? Sure it’s good not to lie. But again, they’ve done it so consistently for 18 months.

Now we’re hearing that DHS has ordered ICE to stop most traffic stops around the country, though this claim is being put out by the administration with no one actually saying it on the record. It’s just “sources.” This also looks like an effort to get Susan Collins out of a jam. She claimed credit today for the shift in policy.

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We’ve discussed a number of times that the high-profile/high-violence occupations of blue cities in 2025 and early 2026 were never designed to maximize deportations. They were meant to overawe and terrorize the city’s inhabitants and the sovereign state governments of those jurisdictions. The public blowback became too extreme and then, along with canning Kristi Noem, DHS/ICE switched to focusing on deportation numbers without most of the high-visibility operations which weren’t really aimed at deportation numbers in the first place. But there have been an increasing number of reports over the last few weeks suggesting that ICE/DHS is intensifying its efforts and upping the number of arrests and detentions. It seems highly likely, though not certain, that the two recent ICE-involved shooting fatalities in the last week — one in Houston and another just today in Maine — are tied to that intensified push for deportation arrest numbers. ICE agents tend to be poorly trained and operate in a culture of violence and impunity. So events like these could happen at any time. But keep an eye on the relationship between the two things. DHS/ICE has been trying to intensify its efforts while avoiding the headlines which were so damaging last winter. But the rapid resorts to fatal violence and the culture of impunity that sustains it, so embedded within Trump Era ICE’s culture, seems to be breaking through.