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US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will require its officers to record vehicle stops with at least one body camera, said Tom Homan, the Trump administration “border czar”, on Sunday. The action comes as the agency is under renewed scrutiny after ICE officers fatally shot two men earlier this month.
“They exonerate more law enforcement than they convict, and I want officers to wear body cameras because I want the American people to see what the officers saw when they took that action,” Homan said on the Fox & Friends Weekend program.
Homan’s comments come after federal immigration agents fatally shot two men six days apart during traffic stops in Texas and Maine earlier this month. There is no body-camera footage from ICE agents involved in those incidents.
In a separate interview on CBS’s Face the Nation show, Homan said money for the cameras was held up during the partial government shutdown earlier this year.
“The cameras have been purchased right now,” Homan said. “They’re training the trainer in deploying the cameras nationwide.”
The immigration agency’s extreme tactics have once again come under public scrutiny in recent days after an ICE officer on ۱۳ July killed Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a driver from Colombia, in the coastal Maine city of Biddeford, about ۱۵ miles (۲۴km) south of Portland. Six days earlier, another ICE officer in Houston fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national.
Salgado, who was not the intended target of the ICE officers, was driving his construction crew to a job site when he was pursued and stopped. Salgado had no criminal history, had lived in the US for ۳۵ years and was close to obtaining legal status, his family has said.
Less than a week later, ICE agents shot and killed Durán during another traffic stop. As with Salgado, Durán was not the target of an operation. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claimed officers feared for their safety. Immigrant rights activists have said Durán was authorized to work in the US and had a social security number.
Homan said last week the agency would temporarily suspend most vehicle stops around the country to review procedures. Within ۲۴ hours of Homan’s comments, Donald Trump directed federal immigration agents to resume them.
The back-to-back shootings sparked protests in Maine, Houston and Boston and raised questions over ICE agents’ lack of body cameras.
ICE launched a body-camera pilot program in ۲۰۲۴ and deployed cameras to officers in five cities: Baltimore, Buffalo, Detroit, Philadelphia and Washington DC. The Trump administration moved last year to slow-walk the program, urging Congress to cut funding by ۷۵%, Reuters reported in January.
In February, after the killing of two US citizens during an immigration crackdown in Minnesota, Kristi Noem, then the DHS chief, said the body-camera program would be rolled out to ICE agents nationwide “as funding is available”.
The killing of Durán was the ۱۱th fatal shooting by federal immigration officials since Trump’s second term began, including the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, according to a Guardian review of public reports.
FBI agents will no longer be investigating confrontations with ICE agents, a New York Times report said, citing people briefed on the decision. They said written notice had been sent on Thursday of this decision. Previously, these investigation cases could yield information that could be used to prosecute ICE agents involved in violent encounters.
Dani Anguiano contributed reporting
