Nick Miroff writes:

Late last night, at the end of a day that started with the killing of a 26-year-old Colombian man in Maine, the second fatal shooting involving a vehicle stop in a week, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement official Liana Castano sent out an email to top ICE supervisors around the country. “Effective immediately,” Castano wrote, “vehicle stops are suspended until further notice.”

It was an extraordinary directive to ICE officers on the street, essentially telling them to no longer attempt to pull over suspects in cars. ICE has been ramping up immigration arrests across the country in recent weeks to roughly 2,000 a day, nearly doubling the number of people it takes into custody compared with the spring. Many of those arrests have occurred during stops by ICE officers traveling in unmarked cars. Castano’s email said exceptions would be made in instances when ICE pursues criminal suspects in cooperation with other police agencies. But ICE officers, operating on their own, were told to stand down.

“All personnel are instructed to prioritize other existing operational methods, outside of vehicle stops, to conduct immigration enforcement activities,” Castano instructed, according to a copy of the email I obtained. The existence of the order was first reported by The Daily Wire.

The decision to suspend vehicle stops was made by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, with backing from the acting director of ICE, David Venturella, according to a senior administration official who was not authorized to discuss internal deliberations. During his confirmation hearing in March for the top DHS job, Mullin said he didn’t want the department to generate as much controversy as it had during the ICE crackdown in Minneapolis that left two U.S. citizens dead. Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican who is running for reelection, said on social media that she spoke with Mullin last night and asked him to halt all nonurgent vehicle stops by ICE. [Continue reading…]