This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.Two fatalities, a surge in arrests, large protests in the streets — the past two weeks of US immigration news have given me flashbacks to January.
But this time, something’s different. Or at least appears to be different. This time, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents fatally shot two men during traffic stops…the agency ordered most traffic stops to temporarily cease.
The directive is a far cry from the denials and smears ICE lobbed last winter, after agents killed two American protesters in Minneapolis. At the time, administration officials went so far as to baselessly claim the victims were “domestic terrorists.”
The circumstances of these new shootings are different, though early reports from eyewitnesses have raised similar alarms. Yesterday, agents shot and killed a Colombian man — identified as 26-year-old Johan Sebastian Guerrero — after he exited a home they’d been surveilling. Guerrero was reportedly not the target of the surveillance.
Days earlier in Texas, ICE agents fatally shot another man, 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, as he drove three fellow construction workers to a Houston job site. DHS claimed Araujo tried to ram the officers’ vehicle. But the other men in Araujo’s van said the agents never even identified themselves as law enforcement.
The fatal shootings in Maine and Texas underscore an important reality: President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign might’ve faded from the headlines, but it never actually went away.
In March 2026, the most recent month with complete data, ICE arrested nearly 30,000 people, according to Syracuse University research. And just this month, ICE arrested 10,000 people in a single five-day sprint — more detentions than the agency booked per month for long stretches of the Biden administration.
The quiet persistence of the crackdown reflects Trump’s priorities: His desire to deport tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants hasn’t actually changed, even if the PR calculus has.
But it also speaks to a profound administrative shift: ICE is a fundamentally different agency than it was under prior administrations.
Consider ICE’s budget, for instance, which shot up eightfold between 2024 and 2025. ICE now receives more money than the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives…combined.
For the first time in at least 20 years, ICE is also charged with entering communities to make proactive arrests, as opposed to merely picking up undocumented people detained on other charges by local or state police. That’s how we ended up with agents surveilling homes and making traffic stops in the first place.
➨ If you’ve never read The Odyssey, there’s no time like the present. Christopher Nolan’s movie of the same name comes out this week and seems destined to be a gigantic hit. Also, Vox’s Constance Grady says, it’s “funny, gripping, and sexy.” That’s not exactly my recollection from 11th-grade English, but I’m willing to give another translation a read!
