Agents in Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Have Fired at Vehicles at Least 10 Times

The confrontations over the last four months have left two people dead and prompted criticism of federal agencies for allowing officers to open fire on moving vehicles.

Maryland. Chicago. Phoenix. Los Angeles. Minneapolis.

And now Portland.

The shooting of man and woman on Thursday in Portland, Ore., was at least the 10th since September by federal agents who are part of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown — and all 10 involved people who were in their vehicles.

Confrontations involving cars have emerged as perhaps the most dangerous moments in the federal sweeps, which is striking given how well the risks of such encounters have been documented and how aggressively many law enforcement agencies have sought to avoid them.

At least two people, including a driver killed in Minneapolis this week, have died in the immigration crackdown shootings by federal agents over the last four months. Federal officials have said that the actions were justified because vehicles had been “weaponized” and that agents’ lives were in jeopardy.

But experts have said that standing in front of a car, as the agent in Minneapolis did before killing the driver, and firing into a car, as agents in Portland apparently did, break with widely accepted best practices in American law enforcement — and with the federal government’s own protocols.

Federal agents can fire at a car only under two circumstances, according to the U.S. Justice Department: A person in the car is threatening the officer or others with “deadly force by means other than the vehicle,” or the driver is operating the vehicle in a way that threatens serious injury or death.

The circumstances of the shooting in Portland are still unclear, with no video yet to emerge. But the deadly encounter in Minneapolis was captured on video from many vantage points, and President Trump and other federal officials have said the footage shows why the agent was justified in opening fire on the woman driving the car.

Some former law enforcement officials, however, have said the agent may have created a danger himself, by stepping in front of the vehicle, that led him to open fire and kill the driver.

Dwight Holton, the U.S. attorney in Oregon during the Obama administration, said he has heard from former colleagues this week who are as perplexed as he is by the agent positioning himself in front of the car as other law enforcement officers were trying to confront the driver.

“It’s Traffic Stop 101 that you don’t stand in front of a car,” Mr. Holton said.

Rob Chadwick, who retired from the F.B.I. in 2022 and served as the chief of tactical training at the agency’s training headquarters at Quantico, Va., said that federal agents are trained to never stand in front of a car. (Mr. Chadwick stressed that he was not judging the Minneapolis shooting because he had not examined the videos.)

“Obviously just from a safety standpoint, officers are taught to approach vehicles from angles that would not put themselves squarely in the traffic path if at all possible.”

It’s also a matter of common sense, he said. “It’s clearly a bad idea for anybody,” he said. “Even if your wife or your friend is behind the wheel of a car, it’s not a great idea to stand in front of it or behind it.”

Law enforcement training, Mr. Holton said, emphasizes that “you can’t put yourself in a position that creates risk to yourself so that you can have authorization for use of force.”

In Minneapolis, one agent was coming around the front of the car to the driver’s side when the car began to pull away, and the agent shot the driver, killing her and sending the car careening down the street.

Mr. Chadwick said officers are trained to never shoot at a car to disable it, or to prevent an escape. Deadly force, he said, is authorized only to stop a “person who is either charging you, say with a knife, or driving at you with a car.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions on Friday about what guidance the agency has issued, if any, to agents regarding safety during vehicle stops.

Tricia McLaughlin, a homeland security spokeswoman, and other top federal officials have issued numerous statements and made social media posts supporting the agent in Minneapolis and accusing those who protest immigration enforcement of fomenting violence toward agents. “Dangerous criminals — whether they be illegal aliens or U.S. citizens — are turning their vehicles into weapons to attack ICE,” Ms. McLaughlin wrote in one post.

Even as the agents’ tactics have come under increasing scrutiny, the president and other top officials have sought to send a message of unequivocal support to the law enforcement agencies carrying out the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.

Vice President JD Vance was quoted this week in a social media post by the White House, “I want every ICE officer to know that their president, vice president & the entire administration stands behind them. To the radicals assaulting them, doxxing them & threatening them: congratulations, we’re going to work even harder to enforce the law.”

Mr. Holton said he worries that such statements foster a culture of impunity in which law enforcement officers are not concerned about being held accountable.

“When the president of the United States is telling armed law enforcement ‘don’t worry, whatever you do I will take care of you,’ that sets a very dangerous circumstance for all of us who live in a free society,” he said.

From a legal perspective, shootings by law enforcement officers often turn on whether the actions of the person shot posed a grave threat.

Law enforcement officers have been killed by drivers using their vehicles as weapons. Five officers died in this manner through the first seven months of 2024, according to the most recent data from the F.B.I.

In the case of the Minneapolis shooting, a Times analysis of video of the incident, from multiple angles, raised questions about the official assertion that the driver had presented a deadly threat. Instead, the woman appeared to be turning the car away from the officers.

“Look at the wheels on the car, they are turning to the right, and all he has to do is step out of the way,” Geoffrey Alpert, an expert on police use of force at the University of South Carolina, said this week after reviewing the Minneapolis video at the request of The New York Times. “She’s jacking the wheels all the way to the right.”

Many of the country’s largest cities, including New York and Los Angeles, have banned police officers from shooting at moving vehicles except in very rare circumstances, such as a driver shooting at the police, or a terrorist driving into a crowd. Police cadets often aren’t trained in shooting at moving vehicles, and officials have long warned the practice risks hitting innocent bystanders.

New York City banned the practice in 1972, three days after officers killed a 10-year-old boy fleeing in a stolen car on Staten Island. The police commissioner at the time said the new regulations were “an attempt to balance the safety of the policeman with the safety of the community.”

In a 2023 analysis, the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit, outlined the limits and risks of firing at moving vehicles. “Shooting at a moving vehicle is not an effective way to get it to stop. There is the challenge of hitting a moving target, and the risk of an errant bullet hitting an unintended target, such as a bystander. There is also a risk that if the driver is struck, they will lose control of the vehicle.”

This week, in the aftermath of the Minnesota shooting, Xochitl Hinojosa, a former spokeswoman for the Department of Justice during the Biden Administration, wrote on X that in 2022 the department updated its use of force policy for the first time in 20 years. She wrote that the new policy “included a duty to render medical aid and specifics on how firearms may not be discharged at a moving vehicle in most circumstances.”

Shaila Dewan contributed reporting.

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