ICE Ramps Back Up, With Deadly Results

I'm Paul Tenorio. I cover soccer for The Athletic. And I'm Amy Lawrence. I cover football for The Athletic. Whatever you call it, the biggest competition in the sport is happening right now, and The Athletics World Cup coverage has everything you need to follow the tournament. We've got more than 70 obsessive reporters on the ground. If you're eager to know more about the teams, the matches, all the stories on and off the pitch, we've got you sorted. Throughout the tournament, you have free access to all the coverage in our app. Download the Athletic app and see you there. From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. Two fatal shootings by federal immigration agents in Texas and in Maine have once again put a spotlight on the Trump administration's deportation tactics. Today, my colleague, Hamed Al Yaziz, explains how these killings signal a return to a more aggressive form of immigration enforcement, one that can easily turn a routine moment like a traffic stop into a deadly confrontation. It's Thursday, July 16. Ahmed, in the six months since two Americans were killed by federal agents in Minnesota, the government's deportation crackdown has felt a little bit quieter. Federal agents, of course, withdrew from cities. The protests that we saw after Minnesota really died down. We stopped seeing these gruesome confrontations between law enforcement and civilians that people have been capturing on video. And so all of this put together, I think, made these two recent shootings in Houston and then in Maine feel, at least to some people, like they almost came out of nowhere? Yeah. I mean, I think that's a fair assessment as far as the public's view because in the months after Minneapolis, arrest numbers dropped pretty dramatically across the country. But that kind of came to an end in late June when suddenly, at least at ICE, there was this sense that the White House wanted more arrests, that the enforcement, it needed to go up dramatically. Okay. We're gonna talk about what has led to all of that, but I just wanna talk about the two shootings first. We are still learning the details of what happened both in Maine and in Houston, but can you just tell us, Hamed, what do we know so far about both of those incidents? Yes. The first shooting was on July 7 in Houston. And in that incident, ICE was looking for two individuals that they wanted to come and arrest. Mhmm. And as they're doing that surveillance, as they're looking for those two individuals, they come across a van to them that seemed suspicious. And in fact, inside this van, they believe, individual in the car resembled one of the targets that they were looking for. And so they start to look up the license plate information of this van, and they find that it's registered to somebody who is undocumented. And so they decide to go after the …