Here’s Who Convinced Trump to Block ICE’s Pause on Traffic Stops

Media reports are shedding a bit more light behind the scenes of President Donald Trump’s decision to quickly undo a suspension of Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle stops.

The initial directive was first reported Tuesday, the morning after an ICE agent shot and killed Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero during a traffic stop in Maine. That fatal incident came just days after Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed in Houston in a similar situation. The command would have halted stops by ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division while its agents received additional training.

The next morning, Trump went public with his objections, overturning the change in a Truth Social post. “We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools,” he wrote, “THE TRAFFIC STOP!”

It remains unclear whether the president was aware of the vehicle-stop suspension before it was issued. Officials at DHS and ICE told The Atlantic it’s “highly unlikely” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin would have moved forward with the change without the White House’s green light. (“Not a chance,” one DHS source told the magazine. “Someone got into the big boss’s ear. Three-ring circus.”)

But a high-ranking administration official claimed that Trump had not known about it, The Atlantic reports, and that Mullin never received the White House’s blessing. According to CNN’s sources, neither Mullin nor Tom Homan, the White House’s border czar, made Trump aware of the pause beforehand.

The night after the freeze was first reported, Trump was “livid,” according to Axios, airing grievances about the move to his advisers. CNN reports that the president grew “furious after watching coverage of the temporary change in policy that suggested he was weakening his immigration enforcement.” As one administration official told The Atlantic, the president believed it would “make them all look weak.”

And indeed, criticisms were pouring in from prominent MAGA anti-immigrant extremists, including Steve Bannon and disgraced former Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino, as well as officials in DHS and ICE—one of whom groused to the conservative Daily Wire, “Numbers are going down, we can’t do sh*t.”

Following Trump’s outburst, Mullin, despite apparently being behind the directive, announced that he was now “on the same page” as the president. ...