The Dictatorship
ICE should permanently end vehicle stops
ByDavid J. Bier
Following two killings of motorists in two weeks in Maine and Texas, Immigration and Customs Enforcement briefly suspended most vehicle stops to retrain its agents. The suspension implicitly conceded the obvious — ICE could have prevented these deaths — but President Donald Trump quickly overruled the agency, ordering it to resume the stops.
The president posted on social media Wednesday that “we cannot give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” But he’s wrong. His own adviser, White House border czar Tom Homan, has admitted that vehicle stops are not an important enforcement tool, and that permanently ending them would better protect ICE agents, their targets and the public.
ICE agents appear to relish the car chases and often fail to stop the suspect before they drive away.
It’s true that ICE officers receive less training on vehicle stops. That’s because, before this administration, most arrestees came straight from federal, state or local custody, and when ICE had to go to the streets, it carefully planned operations — surveilling suspects to learn their routines, sometimes for weeksand working as a team of agents and creating a pre-enforcement action plan.
To speed up arrests, however, ICE reportedly eliminated the pre-enforcement planning last year as it started targeting areas more than specific people. “It’s hard to fill out a worksheet that just says, ‘Meet in the Home Depot parking lot,’” one former ICE official told NBC News. Enforcement went from targeted and planned to indiscriminate and opportunistic, which led to more chaotic interactions.
Reflecting this lack of planning, both of the immigrants shot and killed in the past two weeks were not the individuals ICE agents were originally looking to arrest, according to lawmakers who spoke to officials. A similar situation played out in Minnesota earlier this year, when ICE agents mistook a DoorDash driver for their target before shooting him after he ran into his home. (That officer was charged after video evidence from a city traffic camera contradicted his account.)
Even when pre-arrest surveillance of a specific suspect is conducted, ICE agents appear to relish the car chases and often fail to stop the suspect before they drive away. One Department of Homeland Security supervisor described the attitude to The New York Times as “we’re adrenaline junkies who want action, foot chases, car pursuits.”
In October 2025, for instance, agents waited outside the home of Carlitos Ricardo Parias, a TikTok influencer, whom ICE was particularly interested in arresting. But rather than leap immediately into action, they let him get into his car. This led to a vehicle stop at which an ICE agent shot Parias, and the bullet ricocheted into a U.S. marshal.
On Fox News Tuesday, Homan admitted that there’s no downside. “I hear a lot of noise right now, ‘this will affect ICE arrests.’ It’s not going to,” he said.
Another shooting in California in April 2026 followed the same pattern. ICE did the surveillance but let the suspect get into their car. This appears to have been intentional. In June, surveillance video captured what appears to be a targeted ICE arrest in Milwaukee, in which officers allowed the suspect several minutes to get a snack and re-enter his vehicle before the team moved in for the arrest.
When stops do happen, as a Wall Street Journal investigation found earlier this yearICE agents commonly use tactics that place themselves in unnecessary risk: failing to tell drivers to turn off their engines, grabbing cars when they start to move, placing their bodies — rather than vehicles — in the way, and then shooting at uncooperative drivers.
DHS’ use-of-force policy already gets most of these issues right. It prohibits officers from “intentionally and unreasonably placing themselves in positions in which they have no alternative to using deadly force.” It bars shooting drivers unless there is an imminent risk of serious bodily harm.
Outside of a terrorist attack where the car is the weapon, shooting the driver does not lessen the threat; it enhances it. After an ICE agent in Minneapolis shot Renee Good, the car didn’t stop. It accelerated until it crashed. In Maine, ICE officers had to try to grab the car on foot to stop it after the injured driver lost control, and the car circled blindly. Eventually, an ICE agent used his vehicle to stop it.
ICE’s suspension of most vehicle stops would force agents to spend time learning new tactics, but doing so would have gone a long way to protect agents, targets and bystanders. Rather than a temporary reprieve, in fact, ICE should have made it permanent.
On Fox News Tuesday, Homan admitted that there’s no downside. “I hear a lot of noise right now, ‘this will affect ICE arrests.’ It’s not going to,” he said. “Before he gets into the car, you can arrest him then. You can wait until the vehicle gets to its destination,” he said — unless the target is a violent criminal. He added, “If we can take that 2-ton ‘weapon’ away from them, that’s good.”
Homan is admitting what the record shows: ICE has been endangering its officers and others for no enforcement benefit. Ending vehicle stops won’t end all the problems, or even all the deaths. But continuing them means more danger for ICE personnel and the public.
David J. Bier
David J. Bier is the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute.
Donald Trump hasn’t exactly been shy about the point of the prime-time speech he intends to deliver Thursday night. During an appearance on Newsmax this week, for example, the president peddled familiar, tiresome nonsense: “Our elections are crooked, and we’ve got to straighten them out.”
A day later at an unrelated White House event, he said he didn’t want to go into a lot of detail about what would be included in his address, though he did tell reporters“What we’re going to be talking about Thursday is, it doesn’t get bigger, because without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country.”
The president neglected to mention that Americans already have a country, as well as free and fair elections.
But while the public waits to hear Trump’s latest conspiratorial pitch, it’s worth appreciating the fact that the format he has chosen has not exactly served him well.
In recent decades, prime-time presidential addresses are generally reserved for major announcements about pressing matters of great significance. Trump’s prime-time presidential addresses, however, tend to be duds.
Consider some of the more notable examples.
April 1, 2026: The president delivered remarks on the war in Iran, though once it was over, no one seemed to have any idea what the point of the speech was. He presented no plan. He offered no coherent vision. Trump meandered from dubious point to dubious point and peddled a contradictory message about a possible endpoint, leaving many viewers even more concerned about the war. The New York Times’ Helene Cooper summarized“Trump has concluded speaking after 19 minutes. … This was a rehash of his Truth Social posts over the past month.”
The speech had no discernible effect on public attitudes or his approval rating.
Dec. 17, 2025: Trump delivered a prime-time address, ostensibly to talk about how great the first year of his second term was. What he presented, however, was 18 minutes of combative presidential blame-shifting and excuse-makingpackaged in the unsubtle desperation of a man who didn’t seem to understand why so much of the public failed to appreciate his systemic failures and embarrassments.
The speech also had no discernible effect on public attitudes or his approval rating.
March 11, 2020: As the Covid-19 pandemic started to wreak havoc in the United States, Trump delivered a weird Oval Office address in which he flubbed his own policyprompting White House officials to spend the rest of the evening clarifying that the president didn’t exactly mean what he said.
The speech also had no discernible effect on public attitudes or his approval rating.
Jan. 8, 2019: In the middle of a government shutdown he was responsible for, Trump delivered an Oval Office address for no apparent reason. Over the course of nine minutes, he presented no plan, offered no material, endorsed no solution and had no factsas evidenced by the avalanche of falsehoods he peddled to the nation. Rachel Maddow asked as part of MS NOW’s live coverage, “Why did he just do this? … Why did this just happen?”
The speech also had no discernible effect on public attitudes or his approval rating.
Taken together, it’s hard not to wonder if this just isn’t Trump’s best format.
A member of the president’s team told Axios this week that he wants to do prime-time speeches because they “give a sense of importance to what he’s saying.”
I don’t doubt that this is the idea behind the addresses, but as Hearst columnist Philip Bump explainedTrump and his team apparently haven’t figured out “that he’s dragging the gravitas down rather than it lifting him up.”
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
This is the July 15, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter.Subscribe hereto get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.
In his final speech as president, Ronald Reagan talked about the importance of immigrants to America’s heritage.
“You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”
Johan Sebastian Guerrero came to America from Colombia. The 25-year-old husband and father worked two jobs to support his wife and 3-year-old daughter.
On Monday in Biddeford, Maine, ICE agents shot him dead through his car window. His wife knelt weeping over him in the street as their daughter watched.
Johan wasn’t even the person they were looking for.
The young father’s killers were whisked away, like King George III would have protected British troops who gunned down colonists 250 years ago.
Now as then, no body cameras, no investigations, no justice.
Source: Gallup poll of 1,001 U.S. adults, conducted June 1-15, 2026, margin of error: ±4 percentage points
INFLATION DOWN, BUT NOT OUT
Wednesday’s June inflation report can be read two ways: Since May, prices fell — driven by the drop in oil and gas. But compared to a year ago, prices are still 3.5% higher, which is exactly how much wages have risen over the same period.
In other words, consumers have not achieved any “real” growth in purchasing power over the past year.
Watch Steve Rattner break down the numbers below.
WHAT THEY SAID
John Heilemann on GOP politics
“The last things Ken Paxton and Susan Collins want to talk about are mass deportation and ICE on one hand and election fraud on the other. Yet those are the two issues in the headlines in Texas, in Maine, and all across the country. Donald Trump is bringing Republicans a political nightmare heading into November.”
Sen. Chris Coons on Maine ICE shooting
“Hearing the account of Sebastián’s widow and 3-year-old wailing by the side of the car after he had been shot point-blank is just heartbreaking. All of us need to step up and do a better job of holding accountable those to whom we give the power of life and death. This is a fundamental challenge to civil liberties and to justice in our nation.”
Lisa Rubin on Todd Blanche
“I knew Todd Blanche briefly when I was in private practice, and I witnessed the adoration firsthand. He was liked for many reasons. He was a regular guy, the paradigmatic lawyer that jurors would want to have a beer with. The guy that I see on our screens growling from the podium at the Department of Justice is entirely inconsistent with the person that I briefly knew.”
CATCH UP ON MORNING JOE
The Dictatorship
Ossoff predicts Trump’s primetime address will be a ‘pretext for an abuse of federal power’
Ahead of the president’s primetime address on Thursday, Sen. Jon Ossoff is warning that Donald Trump could be setting the stage for an “unconstitutional use of federal power” to interfere in November’s midterm elections.
The Georgia Democrat sat down with MS NOW’s Just Psaki on Tuesdasy to discuss the upcoming remarks and why, almost six years after the 2020 election, Trump is still obsessed with the Peach State. MS NOW reported that the president’s speech will focus on voting machine security and alleged efforts by foreign nations to influence U.S. elections, two claims central to the election conspiracy theories Trump has pushed, without evidence, since his 2020 loss.
The president is also expected to release declassified intelligence documents on both subjects, including files related to Georgia’s 2020 results and the January 2021 Senate runoffs that followed. In that election, the two Democratic candidates, Ossoff and Sen. Raphael Warnockwon both of the state’s open Senate seats.
When Psaki asked Ossoff why he thinks Trump is so focused on Georgia, he told her the president is “obsessed” with the state “because he can’t get over the fact that it was Black voters and Black political power who were instrumental to his defeat in Georgia.”
He also addressed reports that the president could use his primetime address to declare that he and Warnock are illegitimate senators. “Obviously, the president has no power to do that,” he said. “But he does have the power to try to intimidate people.”
The Georgia Democrat said Trump has “demonstrated his will to abuse power” and predicted the speech will be used to “lay the groundwork” for challenging any midterm result the president is unhappy with. Ossoff told Psaki he expects Trump “to use whatever he puts out there on Thursday as a pretext, either for some attempted unconstitutional use of federal power to interfere in the election or to give his proxies and loyalists in state and local jurisdictions some cover for whatever they might attempt.”
He added: “I think that he is trying to create some pretext for an abuse of federal power, trying to create cover for state and local allies to get up to no good in those jurisdictions, and try to lay the groundwork for some kind of potential challenge to the results. That’s what I think his goal is.”
Ossoff said it was important to take a “step back” and look at the context of the president’s worsening political situation. The senator argued that Trump’s return to pushing election conspiracy theories shows his desperation as his party faces the very real possibility of losing control of Congress in November.
“You’ve got the American public broadly furious with the president for war and tariffs and healthcare cuts that are making everything more expensive — this palpable anger that he doesn’t care about the cost-of-living crisis [and is] more concerned with lining his own pockets,” Ossoff said. “And so now he’s pivoting — with the election just a few months away — from ballroom obsession to election conspiracy theory obsession.”
You can watch Ossoff’s full interview in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW. She was previously a segment producer for “AYMAN” and “The Mehdi Hasan Show.”
- GOP concerns grow after 2 ICE shootings in a week
- ICE should permanently end vehicle stops
- If recent history is any guide, Trump’s primetime address won’t be a success
- Is there a single Republican on Capitol Hill today willing to speak up to Trump?
- Ossoff predicts Trump’s primetime address will be a ‘pretext for an abuse of federal power’
- Wednesday’s Campaign Round-Up, 7.15.26: Maine Democrats to appear in hastily arranged debate
- Vance fails to quell fiscal hawk concerns about GOP reconciliation plans
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