SerpApi.Org
On July 7 in Houston, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot a driver, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, during an operation that may have been targeting someone else.
Less than a week later in Biddeford, Maine, an ICE officer shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero during an attempted vehicle stop in which he, too, was not the intended target.
Both shootings remain under investigation, neither produced body camera footage, and together they illustrate how immigration enforcement can profoundly affect people far beyond the name on an agent's list.
Start the day smarter. Get all the news you need in your inbox each morning.
These cases also expose a broader accountability problem. The Department of Homeland Security tracks enforcement incidents, but its tally excludes many people whom agents threaten, hold at gunpoint, pepper spray or restrain in the course of their work. Now, the FBI will no longer investigate confrontations with ICE and other federal officers.
As The New York Times reports, "Such a change would sharply limit law enforcement scrutiny of immigration agents."
ICE agents arrested 10,000 people in just 5 days
While the Trump administration has stepped back from headline-grabbing ICE surges in American cities, its immigration crackdown continues. Federal agents arrested 10,000 people in just five days at the end of June, according to The Associated Press.
Memphis shows what this quieter model looks like. Since January, nearly half of ICE arrests there have involved people with no convictions.
MLK50 and ProPublica found that from October to February, the federally led Memphis Safe Task Force had arrested more than 800 immigrants. Of those, only 17, or 2%, were also taken into custody on a violent crime charge or warrant.
About 4 in 5 of these arrests began with traffic stops.
In short, this was not a mass raid. It was immigration enforcement folded into routine policing. That shift makes the safety and accountability of traffic stops increasingly consequential.
ICE makes traffic stops more dangerous than ever
After the fatal shootings in Texas and Maine, ICE agents were told to suspend most vehicle stops nationwide, except those involving serious criminal targets, pending additional training.
President Donald Trump overturned the pause the next day, saying traffic stops should continue. But the reversal does not erase why ICE paused: Its leaders saw enough risk to reassess the tactic.
Whether force was justified in any encounter is an important question. It will depend on what each person did and what threat, if any, the driver posed. Someone trying to strike an agent ‒ as ICE accused Salgado Araujo of doing in Houston ‒ presents a different danger.
In the fatal shooting near Portland on July 13, the ICE officer has defended his action to his former wife. "I asked him why he did it," she told The Times, "and he said, 'The guy tried to hit me.'"
News coverage can show what happened in a particular encounter. Many others go unreported. Only comprehensive data can show how often such incidents happen. DHS records, unfortunately, leave out the details needed to fully assess them.
Since May 2022, DHS has published department-wide data on use-of-force encounters. But it counts incidents, not every person or application of force.
The Government Accountability Office notes that one incident can include several officers, several people and multiple use-of-force events. If three agents pepper spray 10 people during one arrest, DHS reports a single incident. The other nine people disappear from the total, along with information about whether they were targets, alleged obstructors or bystanders.
Missing records makes misconduct harder to detect. That blind spot is widening just as the government removes other tools of accountability. In 2025, the Justice Department shut down the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, which contained disciplinary findings and other records involving more than 4,000 officers.
Nearly a quarter of its entries came from Customs and Border Protection, reflecting the coordinated role that CBP and ICE play during immigration-enforcement surges.
Losing this shared record makes it harder to identify officers with histories of misconduct.
A sound federal policy to protect members of the public from unintended harm during immigration operations would have three key components:
- First, it would provide comprehensive reporting on the number of stops and encounters, every person threatened or subjected to force, and whether that force involved physical tactics, chemical agents, a pointed gun or an explicit threat.
- Second, routine vehicle stops would be governed by clear rules for initiating and ending stops, supported by body camera requirements, preservation of footage and records indicating whether the person stopped was the intended target.
- Third, the policy would provide for prompt, independent review whenever agents point a gun at, pepper spray or restrain someone who was not the operation’s target, with findings made public without revealing sensitive tactics. A restored federal misconduct repository would provide an additional layer of accountability.
These rules would protect sensitive operations while showing who was harmed and why. In a climate where unintended casualties are sowing growing concern, they could also restore public trust while protecting the innocent.
Legitimate enforcement needs a record the American public can examine and test. Count every person. Preserve the evidence. Protect the right to observe. Name who is responsible.
Thaddeus L. Johnson, a former police officer, is a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice and teaches at Georgia State University. His wife, Natasha N. Johnson, is an assistant professor of educational studies and research at Augusta University.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: ICE killings show 'quieter' crackdown is just as deadly | Opinion
