An ICE officer fired into another moving car, this time in Maine

In  the minutes after an immigration officer opened fire in a small coastal city in southern Maine, a now-familiar story began to unfold: another person had been shot and killed inside a moving vehicle during an immigration enforcement operation.

The Department of Homeland Security later said the officer fired his weapon when the man they were pursuing attempted to flee the scene, threatening “public safety.”

It’s a narrative that has been repeated again and again since the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown began, with federal officers confronting drivers then saying they opened fire when their vehicles became a danger. That’s despite decades of warnings from policing experts that shooting into moving cars presents a danger of its own and should almost always be avoided.

The Embassy of Colombia identified the man killed Monday in Biddeford, roughly 15 miles (24 kilometers) southwest of Portland, as Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian national. Some friends, neighbors and an advocacy group have spelled his name “Joan.”

Nine dead in immigration operations

He is the ninth killed during immigration operations since the start of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. At least four of those deaths involved people in vehicles, including one last week in Houston, a trend so troubling U.S. Sen. Susan Collins said Tuesday she urged DHS secretary Markwayne Mullin “to cease all non-urgent vehicle stops.”

A person familiar with the matter told AP Tuesday that administration officials told immigration officers to suspend most vehicle stops. Some policing experts say Immigration and Customs Enforcement should never have conducted traffic stops.

“They’re saying that all these cases are justified because the officers were in danger,” said John Sandweg, who was acting director at ICE, which is part of DHS, during the Obama administration. “But then why the hell are we putting the officer in danger by asking them to execute traffic stops?”

Sandweg, who estimates........

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