In the wake of recent shootings in Texas and Maine, President Trump’s mass deportation campaign hit another wall. Over the past week, two men, one from Mexico and another from Colombia, were killed during encounters with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents during traffic stops.

ICE says that both of the two men, Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Maine and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas, were in the country illegally, but that they were not the intended targets of ICE’s operations. Critics have used these cases of mistaken identity to impugn ICE and Trump’s efforts to secure the nation’s interior. In response, ICE temporarily paused vehicle stops across the country.

However, President Trump on Wednesday used TruthSocial to reverse that policy, writing, “[W]e must be strong, tough, and smart, and we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!”

Fatal shootings by ICE, while unfortunate, are rare. Considering the scale of ICE’s operations, the number of fatalities during these inherently dangerous operations has been very low. ICE agents have been making hundreds of arrests each day across the nation for the last 18 months, and ramped up to 2,000 arrests per day in June. Despite the intensity of its operations and the fierce public backlash, there have been only 11 deaths related to ICE enforcement operations during Trump’s second term beginning January 2025. That is compared an average of 800 people killed in the U.S. every year by police and other law enforcement officers. And yet, left-wing newspapers like The Guardian quote pro-immigrant activists about “terrifying new levels” of ICE violence.

There were an estimated 14 million illegal aliens in the country in 2023, according to Pew Research. At least 3.5 million of these illegals are in the U.S. as a result of the Biden administration’s reckless open border policies. Given the scale of the illegal immigration problem, the operational difficulties in operating in hostile blue cities, and the reckless, violent resistance to arrest by the illegals themselves, some deadly incidents are bound to occur. It is unreasonable to expect ICE agents to respond to every contingency in a way that results in zero incidents.

There is no crisis of illegal aliens being killed by ICE. The real crisis is the massive, uncontrolled illegal immigration that has festered largely unchecked—a problem the country never asked for and never wanted, and one that Trump was elected to solve.

Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somali immigrant, decried the killings in Maine and Houston, saying they are evidence of systematic corruption and reiterating calls to “abolish ICE.” But there is no record of Omar commenting on Clemente Lara-Hernandez, a Mexican man with a violent criminal history, who remains at large after fleeing the scene of an ICE traffic stop in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on July 1. Surveillance video shows the agents approaching Lara-Hernandez on foot in clearly marked “ICE” vests and attempting to remove him from his SUV. Lara-Hernandez pulled away, striking an ICE vehicle that was parked in front of him to block his passage and driving the wrong way down a one-way street, hitting a civilian’s car.

Much has been made of the fact that both Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastian Guerrero were wrongly identified as the targets of the respective operations in which they were killed. But these apparent mix-ups, rather than discrediting ICE, merely demonstrate the both the difficulty of the task they have been given and how widespread the illegal immigration problem is. Misidentification is to be expected in any large-scale deportation effort targeting a massive, unlawful population of foreign people from a handful of Spanish-speaking countries, working in a few blue-collar occupations.

The bottom line is that Salgado Araujo, who had lived in the United States illegally for 35 years before he was killed, and Guerrero, who entered the country during the Biden-era surge, would still be alive today if the immigration laws had been properly enforced rather than obstructed. Rather than concede this truth, Democrats and media mavens are running a predictable playbook. But the narrative is already getting jammed up. Reports that Araujo had crystal meth in the vehicle, if true, belie the benign family man image currently being painted by the mass media.

Rather than confront the immigration crisis, Democrats—who see nothing wrong with allowing millions of illegals to invade our country—obstruct ICE’s efforts wherever possible with petty objections and delay tactics. The men who were killed were ultimately paying the ultimate price for the Democrats’ insane political agenda.