US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has suspended the use of traffic stops to detain immigrants after two fatal shootings by ICE agents, according to media reports Tuesday.
The Department of Homeland Security instructed ICE officers not to stop moving vehicles to arrest or question the occupants inside, according to the Wall Street Journal and other outlets.
It comes after an agent on Monday shot dead a 26-year-old Colombian man in Maine. An ICE spokesperson said a vehicle "attempted to flee the scene and fearing for public safety an officer discharged his weapon."
Rights groups identified the victim as Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a delivery driver authorized to work in the United States, who lived with his wife and three-year-old daughter.
Colombian leader Gustavo Petro, a harsh critic of President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, called the killing a "murder of a Latin American Colombian at the hands of the US government."
"They killed him because they believed he was an inferior being without rights," Petro wrote on X.
Last week, an ICE agent shot dead Lorenzo Salgado, a 52-year-old Mexican, during an operation in Texas.
Immigration authorities claimed that Salgado "weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense."
But witnesses have disputed that account, saying that the agent was never directly in front of the vehicle.
Tasked with enforcing Trump's immigration crackdown, ICE's heavily armed agents have faced nationwide backlash for aggressive tactics and for the shooting deaths of two US citizens this year in Minneapolis.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
