Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsFriday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin was asked at a press conference about his previous comments of “turning down the temperature.” This was a reasonable question given that two men, one in Texas and one in Maine, were recently shot and killed by immigration agents who approached them in their cars. A few days earlier, following conversations with Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine, Mullin had said he was temporarily suspending traffic stops, which certainly sounded like a temperature turndown. But then Donald Trump promptly stomped on that idea: “We CANNOT give up on I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” the president wrote on Truth Social. So in response to the question about temperature Friday, Mullin gave the answer his boss required: “I turn down the temperature with you guys,” he said, pointing to the reporters, and continued, “we’re turning up the heat on the streets.”Right now immigration enforcement is in a combustible place. Both of the recent killings involved traffic stops, which immigration officers have less experience and training in than other law enforcement. The Maine killing involved a new recruit who, according to emerging reports, had a history of violent behavior and serious mental-health issues. Since the killing of two American citizens in Minnesota in January, approval for Trump’s immigration-enforcement tactics has dipped. And yet he is getting pressure from his supporters to stay firm. Despite the recent killings, the administration says it is still trying for 2,000 immigration arrests a day.Our guest today is the staff writer Nick Miroff, who covers immigration. We talk about the details of the shootings, the problem with the traffic stop, and the direction Mullin seems to be taking the agency.The following is a transcript of the episode:Nick Miroff: These ICE officers are swooping in out of nowhere, in some cases trying to pin the vehicle of the person that they want to arrest. And, you know, if they do this hundreds of times a day across the country in multiple cities, it stands to reason that in some cases the people they’re after are going to panic. And if they panic and try to drive away, does that, you know, justify killing them, you know? And the answer is no, of course, but it points to the inherent risks of these kinds of tactics by ICE officers.Hanna Rosin: The recent killings of two men—Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine—by immigration officers have put the Department of Homeland Security back in the place that Secretary Markwayne Mullin was trying to avoid.Markwayne Mullin (from his Senate confirmation hearing on March 18): My goal, in six months, is that we’re not in the lead story every single day.So, the administration didn’t want to be on the front page, but it didn’t want to give up on its aggressive immigration agenda either. Recently it’s ramped up immigration arrests to 2,000 a day. And Friday Mullin said they are staying the course.Mullin (from his press conference on July 17): We’re turning up the heat on the streets. We’re out there working harder than we ever have because we’ve empowered our law enforcement to do their job.Many of the recent arrests were traffic stops—that’s how the men in Texas and Maine were killed. And in Maine, the officer involved was a new recruit with, reports say, a history of violent behavior and serious mental-health issues.So they are definitely back in the headlines.I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Joining me today to talk about the two recent killings and about DHS Secretary Mullin, is Nick Miroff, who covers immigration for The Atlantic.Rosin: Hey Nick. Welcome to the show.Miroff: Thanks. Good to be with you.Rosin: So after Renee Good and Alex Pretti were shot and killed in Minnesota, there was a lot of pushback against the way immigration enforcement was being done, including by Republicans, including by some MAGA people. So how did we get back here again with two killings by immigration officers in such a short period?Miroff: Yeah, well, there was a kind of a broader pullback, right? I mean, the administration sent Tom Homan into Minneapolis to clean things up. The president ousted Kristi Noem. Markwayne Mullin came in as the new DHS secretary, signaling that he wanted things to be quieter, to keep DHS out of the headlines. And yet the calls on the right started, you know, throughout the spring were growing for them to intensify their ICE operations. People were seeing the ICE arrests and deportation numbers lower than they had been prior to Minneapolis. And Markwayne Mullin as well as “border czar” Tom Homan were getting accused on the right of backing off of Trump’s promises to carry out the largest, you know, deportation campaign in U.S. history.And so what we’ve seen in the last few weeks was a rapid intensification of ICE activity. They have been arresting about twice as many people as they were doing a few months ago. And they were trying to do it more quietly. It didn’t look like Minneapolis, because it wasn’t all concentrated in one city. It wasn’t Border Patrol agents, you know, sweeping through neighborhoods. It was the kind of targeted enforcement that Tom Homan signaled that he wanted, to double down on the kind of tactics that ICE has always done.But this time it’s been more focused on vehicle stops, not on homes. It’s on vehicle stops. And these vehicle stops are inherently dangerous for many of the reasons that we have just seen.Rosin: What do we know about the details of these shootings so far? Because we haven’t had the kind of videos emerge like we did in Minnesota, where we could see clearly what happened at the moment of shooting.Miroff: You know, I’d say one thing else about that, which is, you know, if you think about Minneapolis, because every everyone was so stirred up and the protesters were out in the streets, it was almost impossible for ICE to carry out some kind of arrest like this without somebody filming it on a cellphone. Says a lot about how much more quietly they’ve been able to operate since Minneapolis. And the focus on the body cams, you know, is once again become a contentious matter.ICE got, you know, tens of billions of dollars obviously last year through the One Big Beautiful Bill [Act] and got another several tens of billions through the reconciliation bill that passed prior to the shutdown. So the White House is saying it’s the Democrats’ fault that the body cameras haven’t been distributed across the country, but Democrats are pointing out that they had tens of billions of dollars at their disposal, you know, last summer that they could have used on body cameras. And Kristi Noem after Minneapolis said that they were gonna get body cameras out to ICE officers around the country. And here we are six months later with no body-camera footage of either fatal shooting.Rosin: What do we know about each of these incidents? Because it sounds like the traffic-stop element is important. So, so what do we know?Miroff: Well, I mean what’s, I think, you know, one of the first things that’s significant about both incidents is that the officers killed someone who wasn’t the target of their arrest operation that day.So in Houston, the team that went out and decided to pull over the work van driven by Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the 52-year-old construction contractor and father of three U.S. citizens. In that case, they were looking for somebody who they have not named, and they were doing the kind of targeted enforcement that they’ve been doing across the country. Typically they go early in the morning to try to catch people as they’re coming out of their homes and getting into their cars or heading off to work. You know, the tactics that ICE has relied on historically to get people at their homes—that doesn’t work anymore. People no longer open their doors for ICE. They know that officers need a judicial warrant in order to force their way into a home.And so ICE has kind of given up on that tactic and they’re trying to catch people as they’re leaving for work, and that’s what they were doing with this work van, even though Mr. Salgado was not the target of their operation.And so what we know is that they tried to pull him over. There’s surveillance-camera footage showing that he didn’t obey their commands, that he continued to drive. His sons have said that they thought he probably panicked. He was worried that he was getting robbed for his work tools that were his livelihood.So he didn’t stop, and they tried to box him in. The Department of Homeland Security said that he tried to weaponize his vehicle and drive at them. Reporters who went to the scene did not see any major impacts on any of the vehicles suggesting that there was a big crash. And there are eyewitness accounts claiming that the ICE officer who shot Salgado was reaching through the open passenger window, shot him in the stomach, and then the officers pulled him out of the vehicle and tried to handcuff him. There’s a bystander video recorded that shows two officers over him, and he’s moaning in pain. We know he was taken to the hospital after that, where he died.Rosin: You mentioned that Salgado’s sons said he might have panicked when the police tried to stop him because he thought they were trying to rob him. That’s not what a lot of people would picture as a traffic stop. Like, you would see the police lights flashing; you would know that it was a police car. So, what is a traffic stop like by an immigration-enforcement agency?Miroff: Yeah, that’s a great question. These ICE vehicle stops are not like traffic stops conducted by normal police officers with marked cars and flashing lights. These are ICE officers, typically in plain clothes driving in unmarked cars. And they’re really relying on the element of surprise. It isn’t like driving past a police car on the highway and then it turns on its lights and you don’t understand why you’re being pulled over. These ICE officers are swooping in out of nowhere, in some cases trying to pin the vehicle of the person that they want to arrest. And, you know, if they do this hundreds of times a day across the country in multiple cities, it stands to reason that in some cases, the people they’re after are going to panic. And if they panic and try to drive away, does that, you know, justify killing them, you know? And the answer is no, of course, but it points to the inherent risks of these kinds of tactics by ICE officers.Rosin: So that’s Texas. What about the incident in Maine?Miroff: We saw another targeted enforcement operation gone wrong in the town of Bitterford, Maine. And in that incident, what we know is that a team of officers went to a residence looking for someone who had what’s called a final order of removal; an immigration judge had ordered them to leave the country. But it was not the person that ICE ended up shooting.And so, a Colombian father named Joan Sebastián Guerrero was on his way to work coming out of his home. Again, the officers claim that he used his vehicle in a way that they described as a threat to public safety. We’ve seen security footage showing the aftermath of the shooting, in which the vehicle is kind of doing loops in an intersection after they have shot him.The officer involved fired at least four shots through the windshield. He was struck in the head. There’s also footage showing them taking him out of the vehicle and attempting to handcuff him as he’s dying.And we know that the officer who fired was a new hire—in this case, an officer who had federal law-enforcement experience working for the Veterans Affairs Department Police Force, but had been hired by ICE just this year. And I think, you know, more details are coming out about this officer’s training and his background.Rosin: Yeah, and those details are pretty alarming. Members of his family told the media that he had a history of mental-health issues dating back to when he was a preteen and also a history of violent behaviors. So that’s that one officer in Maine.Now more broadly, another thing that’s come up a lot is traffic stops. Both of these killings involved traffic stops. So what’s the significance of that? Is that something that these immigration officers are not particularly trained to handle?Miroff: Yeah. What I’ve been told is that, you know, ICE officers not only went through this kind of fast-track training program last fall and into this winter, because of the White House’s urgency in getting, you know, thousands of more trainees out onto the streets; that generally ICE officers don’t get as much training in safe vehicle stops as, say, large police departments and that at the same time they are increasingly relying on this tactic in order to make their arrest numbers and to meet the pressure from the White House to have more and more arrests and deportations.And so they’re relying on this tactic. They don’t have what police departments call a vehicle pursuit policy, that really establishes, like, clear guidelines as to when you can use force during a vehicle stop. Because what the Supreme Court has established is that you cannot shoot somebody just because they’re disobeying your commands or they’re fleeing police officers. They have to—the officer has to be able to articulate, you know, a reasonable fear of imminent harm to themself, to the other officers, or to the public.Rosin: When we come back, more about what we can learn about how DHS is operating and the agency’s new secretary, Markwayne Mullin.[Break]Rosin: Now, what happened after these killings is confusing, and I think clearing it up will help us understand where immigration policy is headed. The way it was first reported is that Markwayne Mullin talked to Susan Collins, the senator of Maine, issued a policy to at least temporarily halt these traffic stops that you’re talking about. And then Trump comes out on Truth Social and seems sort of incensed by this. What did Trump write, and how do you explain what happened?Miroff: Yeah. Well, the order of events is that Secretary Mullin talked to Susan Collins three times on Monday after the fatal shooting in Maine, and he also talked to Senator Angus King, the other senator from Maine. He had been hearing from senior ICE officials that the vehicle stops were becoming a problem and are exposing the insufficient training of these officers. So he was already hearing about these, about these worries.And so late Monday night, an order went out from an ICE official to all the ICE supervisors around the country to halt the vehicle stops. And so the president—you know, people woke up to this Tuesday and by, you know, Wednesday morning the president sent out his his statement on Truth Social, effectively saying that they needed to continue with the traffic stops, that—kind of countermanding the order from the ICE officials and and saying that the traffic stops are a much-needed tool and that they can’t back down. And we know that he did that because throughout the day on Tuesday as, you know, hard-line—immigration hard-liners and members of the, you know, more extreme members of the MAGA coalition were telling him that it would make him look weak. And then kind of saying similar things to what they said after Minneapolis was that, you know, They’re giving in to protesters to the radical left, they can’t back down from the mass deportation campaign that Trump has promised. And, you know, clearly they broke through to him and he has reversed course. Now, you know, what we’re still seeing is that some kind of new guidance is coming to ICE officers that is going to try to introduce some additional safeguards into these vehicle stops. But it also shows that the president is very sensitive to criticism from his base about any perceived backtracking on this deportation campaign.Rosin: Yeah, ’cause you said it calmly, but it was a lot of capitals and exclamation points. I mean, it seemed like a very aggressive statement the president was making, which doesn’t necessarily clarify the confusion, because I’m assuming that Mullin wouldn’t have issued that statement without checking with someone at the White House. So you think just afterwards there was a lot of MAGA pressure to reverse course, and it’s as simple as that?Miroff: It was telling that on Wednesday, senior administration officials were really throwing Mullin under the bus on this one and saying that he hadn’t cleared this, you know, vehicle-stop order with the White House.But I also spoke to people in the department who said it was—you know, that wasn’t possible, that there’s no way he would have cleared this kind of thing. He would have—in this kind of order would have gone forward without people, including, you know, Tom Homan and Stephen Miller from being aware that they were, that they were—that it was coming.Rosin: Mullin is still in charge for the moment. Has he made any significant changes? How is he different than the previous leadership?Miroff: Well, Mullin came in to replace Kristi Noem, who, along with her top adviser, Corey Lewandowski, ran the department in a very different way and made a lot of enemies there, generated a lot of controversy, and ultimately were removed because of the perception that she was trying to promote her own career, her own interests, and and had just become too much of a liability for the White House in a way that was undermining the president’s broader immigration-enforcement goals. You know, Mullin was brought in, I think, to stabilize the department, to bring a kind of a sunnier presence while still being somebody who was close to the president and intensely loyal to Trump and who would carry out, you know, the the campaign with a better face, so to speak.But, you know, their goal has been to carry out the president’s mass-deportation campaign but more quietly and with less controversy. And I think that they had been relatively effective in doing that up until these shootings. But it really shows the inherent, you know, tension in what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to carry out this incredibly disruptive, intrusive, controversial, you know, deportation campaign in American cities and communities and there’s just no way it’s gonna be quiet and that people aren’t gonna push back.Rosin: So do you have a sense that the two latest shootings could change policy at all—could shift the course of how they’re doing immigration enforcement?Miroff: I think that after the president’s response to that order and his fear of looking weak, I think no. They’re gonna continue pressing forward. They have the money; they have the personnel. Trump has made this commitment. This is like the signature domestic-policy initiative of his second term.So they’re going to go forward and they’re gonna try to, you know, keep a lid on this stuff politically as best they can and the question is gonna be, you know, can they pull it off? How many more of these shootings can Americans stomach?Rosin: Well, Nick, thank you for joining us today.Miroff: Thank you. Anytime, Hanna.Rosin: That’s all for today’s show. This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Mike Pesoli. It was engineered and has original music by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.If you like what you saw here, new episodes of Radio Atlantic drop every Monday and Thursday. You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube page, on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to this publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Until next time, I’m Hanna Rosin.