Trump Reportedly Unpaused ICE Traffic Stops After Tomi Lahren and Steve Bannon Criticized the Move

AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

President Donald Trump reportedly reversed his administration’s decision to suspend most ICE traffic stops after facing intense criticism from prominent MAGA allies, according to a report in The Atlantic on Wednesday.

The magazine’s Jonathan Lemire and Nick Miroff reported that Trump ultimately decided to scrap the directive after a wave of backlash from his supporters, including conservative commentator Tomi Lahren, former Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino, and War Room host Steve Bannon. White House officials told The Atlantic that criticism on cable news Wednesday morning influenced the president’s decision.

According to the report, Trump concluded that pausing traffic stops would “make them all look weak.”

The reversal came just more than a day after Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin ordered ICE officers to suspend most vehicle stops following two fatal shootings involving immigration agents within a week. One incident involved the shooting of 26-year-old Colombian delivery driver Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Maine, while the other involved Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican construction contractor who had lived in the United States for 35 years, in Texas. As The Atlantic notes, neither man had a criminal record, and neither was the intended target of the law enforcement action that led to his death.

On Wednesday morning, Trump publicly rejected the policy in a Truth Social post.

“We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” Trump wrote. “Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands.”

The Atlantic reported that the administration’s about-face represented an embarrassing setback for Mullin, with DHS and ICE officials telling the magazine they found it unlikely the original order would have been issued without White House approval. However, a senior administration official disputed that account, telling the outlet Trump had not signed off on the pause beforehand.

Following Trump’s post, Mullin issued his own statement but did not explicitly tell ICE officers to resume traffic stops.

“President Trump and I are on the same page,” Mullin said in a statement provided to The Atlantic by the Department of Homeland Security. “We want our ICE officers to have all options available to keep them safe while executing our mission of deporting as many illegal alien criminals from our country as possible.”

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