ICE quietly enacted new rules this month that will keep officers involved in deadly-force incidents—such as firing a gun and using a choke hold—off the streets until the completion of an investigation. Previously, these officers were able to return to their regular job in as few as three days. Now they must remain on desk duty until they are cleared by investigators, according to two senior ICE officials with knowledge of the change, who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss agency matters with reporters.Under the old rules, ICE supervisors could lengthen an officer’s period of leave, but such an extension was often viewed internally as signaling a lack of confidence in the officer and their version of events. At ICE and other law-enforcement agencies, officers are typically eager to return to full patrol duties as quickly as possible, and not remain in limbo as an investigation plays out. The change, which has not been publicly announced, means that officers who fire their guns, choke someone, or use some other form of deadly force—even if no one is killed—will potentially be limited to performing administrative duties for much longer periods. Acting ICE Director David Venturella and other senior ICE leaders ordered the change late last month, the two senior officials said.ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to my questions about why the policy change was made or how many such incidents have occurred since President Trump returned to office. ICE officers have shot at least 16 people since last January, four of them fatally, according to public records. Last month, there were two fatal shootings during traffic stops: On July 7, ICE officers in Texas killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old contractor from Mexico, and six days later, an officer in Maine fatally shot Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian immigrant. DHS said the officers fired in self-defense, but the incidents are under federal investigation.Veteran ICE officials have worried for months about the competence of the thousands of new recruits who were added during a hiring binge last fall, many of whom were rushed onto the streets after taking a fast-track training course. The ICE officer in Maine, David Brouillette, was a new hire, and his relatives told reporters he had a history of mental-health issues and violent behavior that should have disqualified him from getting a badge and gun.[Read: The secretary of homeland]Violent confrontations during traffic stops particularly concern ICE leaders; the agency has not typically had so many officers pulling over vehicles and attempting to arrest people who are in cars. After the shootings last month, ICE and DHS pledged to expedite the deployment of body-worn cameras for ICE officers. Although most of the cameras have been delivered, the officials told me that they don’t know when all of ICE’s roughly 15,000 deportation officers will be wearing them. After the killing in Maine, Venturella and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin halted the use of nonemergency traffic stops—but Trump reversed the directive when immigration hard-liners said it made the White House look weak. The president has said that ICE officers “make mistakes sometimes” and can be “too rough,” but they’re doing a “GREAT job.”Arrests by ICE totaled nearly 50,000 in July, the highest level in a single month since Trump returned to office, the officials told me. The agency is no longer using a city-by-city approach to surge arrests, as it did last year under then–Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and this has led to fewer clashes with protesters. But officers remain under pressure to maximize arrests and deportations, and new videos continue to emerge showing officers tackling immigrants and pointing guns at people who are filming them or are allegedly disobeying their orders.ICE leaders say they’re looking for ways to reduce the use of deadly force by giving officers more nonlethal tools. The agency is planning to spend up to $20 million on electrified gloves that allow officers to deliver painful shocks. The gloves, which have been used by some police departments and public-school security officers, will be assigned to ICE teams involved in traffic stops and other potential confrontations, according to the officials I spoke with. They told me the shocks delivered through the gloves are painful but less intense and more localized than those from a Taser, and will be easier to direct than chemical sprays.Prior to the current Trump administration, the use of deadly force by ICE deportation officers in U.S. cities was more rare than shootings by U.S. agents along the Mexico border were, Scott Shuchart, an attorney and a former ICE official who worked at the agency’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties from 2010 to 2018, told me. The U.S. Border Patrol reduced its annual number of shooting incidents more than a decade ago by hiring independent consultants who recommended giving agents more nonlethal tools and better training. The number of Border Patrol’s firearm-use incidents, measured across fiscal years, fell from 55 in 2012 to eight last year. Shuchart said the administrative-leave extension “seemed like a healthy signal” that ICE leaders knew “they might have a real problem” after the shooting in Maine. “They don’t want to be creating more risk by putting people back out on the street,” he said.[Read: ‘Maybe DHS was a bad idea’]Deborah Fleischaker, a senior ICE official during part of President Biden’s term, told me that the change to ICE’s rules will matter little if internal oversight mechanisms don’t hold officers accountable for wrongdoing. Trump officials gutted offices at DHS that had reviewed complaints against ICE personnel and about poor detention-center conditions. “If the goal is to ensure that people are on administrative leave through the entirety of an investigation, that’s a good goal, but it doesn’t speak to the quality of the investigation,” Fleischaker said.Fleischaker, now an immigration-policy adviser at the Hispanic-advocacy group UnidosUS, said Trump officials have conveyed a clear message to the federal workforce that “mass deportation is a high-profile goal of this administration and people need to be real careful of getting in the way of anything that slows that down.”In October, Stephen Miller said on Fox News that ICE officers had “federal immunity” to perform their duties while carrying out Trump’s immigration crackdown. But since then, Democratic leaders in several states have vowed to bring charges against ICE officers for use of excessive force. In Minnesota, state prosecutors charged the ICE officer Christian Castro with four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime for his role in the nonfatal shooting of a Venezuelan immigrant on January 14—a day after DHS published a clip of Miller’s “immunity” remarks. Minnesota has been seeking Castro’s arrest and extradition from Texas, but Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, is challenging the request in federal court. CNN reported today that the Department of Justice is considering filing federal charges against Castro.