ICE pauses most traffic stops amid uproar over 2 killings

**Krutika Kuppalli** (0:01)
WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

**Ari Snider** (0:05)
It's a city, but it feels like a small town, and I think that's part of the shock of how could this happen, this surprise that this could happen in such a small and fairly quiet town.

**Chris Bentley** (0:16)
Outrage and shock after an immigration agent shot and killed a young man in Maine.
It's Tuesday, July 14th, and this is Here and Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR. I'm Chris Bentley. Today on the show, Haitians with temporary protected status will soon lose their ability to work in the US. That could mean staffing shortages at hospitals and nursing homes. Also, what you need to know about the foodborne parasite sickening people across the country.

**Krutika Kuppalli** (0:58)
One of the things that makes this different is that these symptoms often last for weeks. So if someone has persistent diarrhea, especially now that we know that the outbreak is ongoing, they should contact their health provider because they can do a specific stool test to diagnose cyclospora.

**Chris Bentley** (1:13)
That's coming up in about 10 minutes.
But first, Immigration and Customs Enforcement will stop making what it called non-urgent traffic stops after its agents shot and killed two people in the past week. That pause in traffic stops is according to the office of Senator Angus King of Maine, where protesters are back on the streets today after an ICE agent there shot and killed a Colombian man yesterday in the city of Bideford, just south of Portland.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:44)
We want ICE out of Maine.

**Chris Bentley** (1:48)
This is the second time in a week that an ICE agent has fired into a vehicle and killed someone. Last week, an agent shot and killed a Mexican immigrant in Texas during a traffic stop there.
For the latest from Maine, we called up Maine Public's Ari Snider, who told TC On A Deering about the shooting that happened Monday morning.

**Ari Snider** (2:07)
He was a 26-year-old man from Colombia. That's what we understand. He was shot while driving a vehicle.
After leaving a residence in a neighborhood, it's unclear if he was the target of the operation. Senator King's office said that they heard from DHS that he wasn't actually the target. And we understand that he has a partner and a young child.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:27)
So more news today now out of DHS, Department of Homeland Security. What more do we know about their move, they oversee ICE, to order ICE to pause on all quote non-urgent vehicle stops?

**Ari Snider** (2:42)
Well, you know, we're trying to make sense of this along with everyone else. We understand it came out very recently.
But yeah, that's what they said is that they're going to pause all non-urgent vehicle stops. We don't know exactly what that means. You know, I think, you know, what does non-urgent, what is the definition of that? But it could be fairly significant, especially for what we've seen here in Maine, where much of the enforcement, many of the arrests, and certainly some of the more high-profile arrests even before this shooting happened on the roadways. It was usually people getting pulled over while driving. And that led to a real fear and has led to a real fear among many immigrant communities in Maine of being out on the roads, of driving to school, of driving to work, of driving to doctor's offices. So we'll see what that translates to on the ground.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:31)
Maine's Republican Senator Susan Collins posted on X Today that she asked Homeland Security to implement the policy change. Last night there were protests outside her office calling for her ouster. Why are protesters directing outrage at Collins specifically, Ari?

**Ari Snider** (3:49)
Yeah, so I think, well, over the immigration issue, she's drawn a lot of fire from the left over her votes to continue funding ICE. And I believe ICE is now funded through the end of the Trump second term, and has seen its budget grow quite significantly. So there's a lot of criticism over her for funding that agency.
And this criticism isn't new, right? In January, there was a big immigration enforcement surge in Maine, where we saw about 200 people arrested in less than a week, which was really just an astronomical increase from what we'd been seeing even earlier in the Trump administration. And Collins drew a lot of criticism for funding ICE through that as well. And for her response, though, I will add that she said that her role there was trying to speak with former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Christine Noem to sort of wind down those operations. That of course did not play Kate Collins' critics, but that's what she said her role was in trying to wind those operations down.