A Guatemalan man faces vehicular homicide charges after he crashed into another car while allegedly fleeing immigration officers near Savannah, Ga. on Feb. 16. Police say Oscar Vasquez Lopez stopped for immigration agents, then drove off, causing them to pursue him. The crash, soon after, killed special education teacher Linda Davis, who was driving to work.
It's the deadliest in a string of recent crashes involving chases or aggressive driving tactics by immigration officers, and it has heightened concerns about risks to the general public. It comes as the Trump administration's broader crackdown on illegal immigration has alarmed many policing experts about agents' use of force, especially after they shot three people — two of them fatally — during the recent immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota.
Ian Adams, who studies policing at the University of South Carolina, says American law enforcement agencies started reining in high-speed pursuits in the late 1980s.
"We've actually made a lot of progress here in the last 30 years," he says. Most departments now have some form of "pursuit policy," which calls on officers to weigh the risks of a chase against the value of the law enforcement objective.
"Unless stopping that person is important to prevent, like, immediate risk of death or risk of serious injury to someone else, we probably shouldn't be pursuing them," says Adams, who is also a former police officer. "And that's not a controversial statement within policing. That is the norm within policing."
Some departments set specific guidelines. For instance, St. Paul, Minn., police can't chase for anything less than a violent felony, or to stop an imminent, life-threatening danger.
But the SPPD policy does not apply to federal immigration agents operating in the city.
Brandon Reader witnessed a chase by immigration agents in St. Paul on February 11. He says an unmarked car with lights and siren chased a red Prius down the narrow streets of the historic Cathedral Hill neighborhood at "at least" 80 mph. The Prius ran a stop sign and hit another car.
"It was struck on the driver's side and spun, and did almost a full one-eighty," Reader says.
Federal officials said the driver of the Prius is from Honduras, and he "tried to evade law enforcement." He was taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
Reader says he asked ICE agents at the scene if they had a pursuit policy, because he thought this chase wouldn't be allowed.
"The agent stepped forward and snapped at me and said that I was a [expletive] idiot and I needed to walk away," Reader says.
It's a legitimate question. While federal agencies have also adopted pursuit policies, immigration officers appear to have more discretion than many urban police.
A 2012 ICE "Emergency Driving Handbook" tells agents to consider public safety, but leaves it up to them to "choose" whether to chase a suspect.
Customs and Border Protection, a separate agency which has become a major part of recent enforcement surges in the interior of the country, had adopted a more restrictive pursuit policy in 2023, similar to that of some urban police departments. At the time, the officers' union, the National Border Patrol Council, criticized the update for making it "almost impossible" for agents and officers to do their jobs.
In a statement, the Council said "smugglers will be encouraged to drive recklessly" in the knowledge that officers wouldn't chase them.
That policy was rescinded soon after President Trump was sworn in last year, a move the union welcomed.
A new policy was approved last fall. It's partially redacted for the public, but appears to place fewer specific restrictions on CBP officers and agents. It says they are, quote, "responsible for determining when the immediate danger created by emergency driving outweighs the law enforcement benefit."
Some activists who share the road with them say the bar for such "emergency driving" techniques is low.
"They violate traffic laws at will," says Kyle Dekker, one of the activists who follow and observe immigration agents operating in the Twin Cities.
Dekker says he's seen them stop at green lights, then race through intersections on a red as a means of shaking their followers. He also says one of the vehicles he was following came back around and tried to hit his car in what's called a "PIT maneuver."
"I have dash cams [videos], front and rear, where he tried to hit me in the rear panel, my vehicle, to spin me out," he says.
PIT maneuvers were banned by the CBP pursuit policy approved under Biden; that ban is no longer visible in the current, partially redacted policy.
The Department of Homeland Security didn't answer NPR's questions about its pursuit policies, but in an email it called the PIT maneuver a "specific tactic to defuse a dangerous pursuit situation."
It also pointed to reckless driving by "violent agitators." It included a list of "vehicular attacks" against its personnel, with photos of damaged cars.
"The brave men and women of DHS will not be deterred," the email said.
Immigration officers are also reacting to what they see as a growing number of people who refuse to stop for them, such as Christian Molina. In Minneapolis in January, he showed reporters the damage to his car after immigration agents chased him and crashed into him from behind. Molina said he's a U.S. citizen, and felt justified in ignoring their orders to stop.
"They didn't have a reason to stop me, I think," he said in Spanish. "They're not police."
While it's true that federal officers don't have the authority to do traffic stops to enforce state laws, most attorneys say you're still obliged to pull over. And border patrol officers, especially, may be more predisposed to chase someone who doesn't stop.
"Their mission is different," says Geoff Alpert, one of the most prominent experts on pursuit policies and a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina.
He was hired to help update CBP's policy under President Biden, and he pushed for a rule that would bar pursuits for anything less than imminent violent crimes. But he says the agency pushed back, "educating" him on the fact that along the border, most of CBP's work focuses on immigration and smuggling.
"You can't preclude them from chasing a smuggler. If you know that someone has a bunch of drugs in the back of the car or in their car, it's a pretty serious offense," he says. "Now, are you going to chase him downtown Tucson? No. But are you going to chase them out on the dirt roads? Probably."
Alpert says the question now is whether ICE and CBP, as they're deployed to cities away from the borders, will get the right kind of training to know when it's better not to give chase.
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