US PRESIDENT Donald Trump insisted today that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers must continue vehicle stops, overruling an order announced the day before to largely suspend them following a string of fatal shootings.

Ending those stops, Mr Trump wrote, would be “playing right into the criminals’ hands.”

“We can not give up one of Ice’s most important and effective crime-fighting tools, the traffic stop,” he said on his social media site.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin later said that people illegally in the US would be “arrested and deported wherever they are,” but without mentioning traffic stops.

The issue arose after an Ice officer shot dead a Colombian driver in Maine on Monday and a week after the killing of a Mexican motorist in Houston, renewing criticism of the agency’s enforcement tactics that were widely condemned last winter after the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minnesota.

A third death occurred in Florida on Tuesday when a 28-year-old man was hit by a tractor trailer while running away from immigration agents and other federal officers, authorities said.

Hundreds of people protested outside an Ice detention centre in Scarborough, Maine, over the fatal shooting of 25-year-old Colombian national Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero in the nearby town of Biddeford.

“These people are killers and they must leave our state now,” organiser Todd Chretien told the crowd.

The day before, the DHS said that an officer, “fearing for public safety,” had shot dead Mr Duran Guerrero while officers were watching the home of someone they believed was in the US illegally and facing a final removal order.

In a post on X, the department said that when Ice officers had tried to stop a car driven by someone who came from the home, the person tried to flee in the vehicle and the officer fired.

Posting on X, outgoing Colombian President Gustavo Petro branded the shooting a targeted killing “at the hands of the US government.”

He demanded an explanation from President Trump and accused Ice officers of treating Mr Guerrero as “an inferior being without rights.”

There have been at least 10 deaths involving encounters with immigration agents since Mr Trump launched his deportation campaign.

In a separate development, Mexico’s Foreign Ministry formally requested that US state attorneys general open criminal investigations into deaths of migrants in Ice custody or during raids.

Seventeen Mexicans have died at the hands of Ice since the beginning of President Trump’s second term, 14 in custody and three in agency operations.