US President Donald Trump overturned the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) suspension of traffic stops on Wednesday, one day after it took effect.
“We cannot give up one of ICE’s most important and effective crime-fighting tools, the traffic stop,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.
He also praised ICE agents, stated that they were doing a “great job,” and told them that they “are loved and respected in America.”
ICE told officers to suspend most vehicle stops on Tuesday after two men were shot and killed during encounters with the agency involving traffic stops.
The back-to-back shootings sparked protests in Maine, Houston, and Boston and raised questions over ICE agents' lack of body cameras.
The US Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, has characterized both men as "illegal aliens" but acknowledged neither was the intended target of deportation operations that led to their deaths, and authorities offered no evidence to support contentions that either man posed a threat to ICE agents or the public at large justifying the use of lethal force.
Homan calls suspension 'temporary pause'
Trump’s border czar Tom Homan called the suspension a “temporary pause” as opposed to a policy change in an interview with Fox News on Tuesday.
He stated that ICE leadership, as well as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), wanted to investigate if there was “something that could have been done better” during the two shootings or if the agents were “doing their job and bad things happen.”
Later on Tuesday, Homan estimated that the suspension would last “a couple of weeks,” although deferred to ICE and DHS leadership.
Reuters contributed to this report.