The Trump administration has resumed Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle stops just days after the agency temporarily suspended most of the tactic nationwide following two fatal shootings involving people who were not the intended targets of immigration operations.
The brief suspension came after the fatal shootings of Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. ICE reportedly paused most vehicle stops while agents received additional tactical training, but President Donald Trump quickly reversed the decision, arguing that traffic stops remain an essential enforcement tool.
Mike Fox, a legal fellow with the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice, said the administration’s focus on training misses what he believes is the central issue: a lack of meaningful accountability when federal immigration agents violate constitutional rights.
“My main concern from the beginning is, and always has been, there is no way to sue to hold agents accountable,” Fox told the Vanguard in an interview.
Fox argued that existing Department of Homeland Security policies governing use of force are not the problem.
“If you read DHS’s use of force policy, it’s actually good,” he said. “The problem is they don’t follow it. They’re instructed not to follow it and there’s no accountability measure.”
According to Fox, internal agency reforms such as additional training, body cameras or temporary operational pauses will remain largely symbolic unless Congress creates an enforceable mechanism allowing victims to seek damages against federal officers.
“Everything absent a statutory right of action to sue agents who are violating rights is meaningless,” Fox said. “The only other real remedy is of course Congress cutting funding, but because Congress wrote a blank check to DHS for $240 billion that’s good through fiscal year 2029, that’s really not an option.”
Fox’s comments followed a statement he released after ICE announced the temporary suspension of vehicle stops.
“While agency sources state this temporary pause is intended to provide additional tactical training, attributing these tragedies to a mere ‘lack of training’ fundamentally misdiagnoses a deep-seated crisis of federal accountability,” Fox said in the statement.
He added that “the victims were not the intended targets of the operations, and agents used excessive force, proving that the Department of Homeland Security’s robust use-of-force policy is virtually meaningless to the extent its agents are free to violate it with impunity.”
Fox said the pause itself would likely reduce the risk of additional deaths but would not address what he views as systemic failures.
“This move will undoubtedly save lives, and additional training is a welcome step; temporary administrative pauses do not solve the underlying issue,” his statement said.
He called on Congress to establish statutory limits governing immigration enforcement traffic stops and to create what he described as meaningful external accountability.
“True reform requires Congress to take up the Bivens Act, establishing a clear statutory right of action that allows individuals to sue federal officials who violate their constitutional rights,” Fox stated.
He also argued that Congress should abolish qualified immunity for federal officers.
“True justice and systemic change cannot be achieved through temporary agency memos, but only through permanent legislative guardrails that subject federal officers to real, external accountability measures,” his statement said.
During his interview with the Vanguard, Fox repeatedly returned to the issue of civil liability.
“Imagine if DHS violates its use of force policy, if you could sue them for that, that would change things. That would be immensely useful,” he said.
Fox also questioned the pace of ICE’s implementation of body-worn cameras.
“Trump did not rescind the ICE directive requiring body cameras for law enforcement operations,” Fox said. “They just sort of slow walked the rollout and I don’t actually know why that is.”
While emphasizing that he supports universal body camera deployment, Fox argued that cameras alone cannot produce accountability.
“We want better training. We want body cams. We want to limit traffic stops. But at the end of the day, the only way we’re really going to be able to put a stop to this is by creating a statutory right of action to sue,” he said.
Fox also questioned how ICE identifies motorists who ultimately become unintended targets during enforcement operations.
“The two people they gunned down were both illegal immigrants who were Hispanic, but who were not intended targets of ICE operations,” he said. “That is not a coincidence. I mean it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what they’re doing.”
When asked whether ICE is racially profiling motorists, Fox responded, “I can say that unequivocally.”
He added that immigration enforcement appears disproportionately focused on Hispanic motorists.
“We have South Asian immigrants, we have white immigrants, and they’re largely focused on Hispanics, which is a problem,” Fox said.
Fox acknowledged that police officers sometimes stop the wrong individual during legitimate investigations but argued that mistaken stops should not routinely end in deadly force.
“The problem, inevitably, yes, they’re going to wind up accidentally stopping some of the wrong people,” he said. “That in and of itself is not the problem.”
“It’s not great, but it’s not the problem. Because if they’re not killing them, it’s not a huge deal.”
Fox contrasted ICE’s practices with those used by many local law enforcement agencies.
“Why is it that state and local law enforcement are able to do the same job safely and ICE is just gunning people down every day?” he asked. “It just logically doesn’t make sense.”
His comments closely mirror an analysis published by David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, who argued that ICE’s brief suspension of vehicle stops implicitly acknowledged that the recent fatalities could have been avoided.
Writing for MS NOW, Bier argued that vehicle stops were not historically a primary ICE enforcement tactic. Instead, immigration arrests traditionally relied on surveillance, operational planning and coordinated arrest teams. According to Bier, enforcement shifted after the Trump administration increased arrest quotas, reducing pre-operation planning and increasing opportunistic street arrests.
Bier wrote that both Guerrero and Salgado Araujo were reportedly not the intended targets of the operations that resulted in their deaths. He also cited additional incidents, including the shooting of a DoorDash driver in Minnesota after agents allegedly mistook him for another individual.
The article further argues that ICE officers have increasingly engaged in tactics that unnecessarily escalate encounters with motorists, including allowing suspects to enter vehicles before initiating arrests and placing themselves in dangerous positions during traffic stops.
Bier noted that DHS’s own use-of-force policy prohibits officers from “intentionally and unreasonably placing themselves in positions in which they have no alternative to using deadly force” and generally bars shooting at moving vehicles unless there is an imminent threat of serious bodily harm.
He concluded that permanently ending routine vehicle stops would make both officers and the public safer.
Fox agreed that restricting traffic stops would reduce unnecessary risk but maintained that any administrative policy could be reversed by a future administration.
“It needs to be done by Congress because when the administration does something, they can just rescind it as we saw,” he said. “And number two, there needs to be a penalty when they violate it.”
Fox said that congressional action should extend beyond operational rules to include enforceable legal remedies.
“If Congress enacts restrictions, whether that’s mandating body cams, adopting use of force policies legislatively, requiring warrants to enter homes, judicial warrants or anything like that, those are all great proposals,” he said. “But without a statutory right of action to sue, the only liability mechanism is internal accountability.”
He argued that the recent pause in vehicle stops demonstrated that the federal government already recognizes the risks associated with the practice.
“I wanted to see what this temporary suspension of traffic stops looked like,” Fox said. “Unfortunately, we never got to see that because as soon as it happened, Steven Miller threw a hissy fit and Trump reversed it.”
For Fox, the recurring cycle of policy changes illustrates why legislative reform is necessary.
“We want better training. We want body cams. We want to limit traffic stops,” he said. “But at the end of the day, the only way we’re really going to be able to put a stop to this is by creating a statutory right of action to sue.”
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