An agency insider says ICE operations should be shut down because they are killing people. The White House has ordered 2,000 arrests a day.

"I would shut down ops until we got a handle on s--t. Not doing traffic stops. Not blocking the vehicles. If they run, they run. Find them later. Don't force a bad position."

— A senior ICE official, told to PunchUp on condition of anonymity

On Monday in Biddeford, Maine, ICE agents were staking out an address looking for one undocumented immigrant. Instead, they found Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian father who was legally in the United States, heading to work in his Kia Ceed. Agents fired four rounds through his windshield and shot him dead in front of his 3-year-old daughter.

Seven days earlier, in Houston, an ICE officer fatally shot 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican homebuilder who had lived in the United States for decades and was not even the target of the operation.

Two days ago in Aurora, Colorado, Brandon Booth, a 42-year-old employee of GEO Group who works at an ICE detention center, shot at two women protesting outside the facility and wounded one. He then drove away from the scene before police detained him. Booth is on unpaid leave. He was arrested on charges that include attempted second-degree murder.

This is not an accident. It is the product of a system built for speed, not safety, and the people designing it know it.

A senior ICE official told PunchUp, an investigative outlet run by The Daily Beast, that agents are being forced to meet daily quotas of 2,000 arrests set by the White House. Leaders are being fired for missing numbers. Leave is being canceled. Eighty percent of every field office was required to be on duty on July 4th.

"They are being pushed to the extremes," the official said. "It's a very bad, toxic environment. Morale is horrible."

Translation: when your boss tells you that 2,000 people need to be in cages every day or you lose your job, the people doing the arresting are going to stop asking whether they should.

Traffic stops have become the primary method of enforcement. But every stop now carries the risk that the driver will try to flee, and when they flee, agents are trained to block and pursue. The insider said this is what is killing people. Vehicle stops are the flashpoint. Every one is a potential shooting.

The agent who killed Guerrero in Maine has been identified as David Brouillette, a 37-year-old Army veteran who deployed to Afghanistan from May 2012 to February 2013. According to the Associated Press, close relatives describe him as a violently unstable man who should never have been given a federal badge and a gun.

One relative told the AP: "Afghanistan destroyed him. Trained him to be a killing monster, a machine. They took someone who was extremely mentally ill and turned him into a killing machine."

Brouillette was diagnosed with severe bipolar disorder and attention deficit disorder as a child. He attempted suicide twice at age 12 and was hospitalized multiple times. His ex-wife, Ashley Brouillette, told the Portland Press Herald that he was abusive during their two-year marriage, including an incident where he threw boiling water at her while holding their daughter. She said she had warned his military superiors about his mental health, and he stayed on the job.

Hundreds of family court records accuse Brouillette of stalking, harassment, and physical and verbal abuse.

Yet ICE hired him anyway. When the Portland Press Herald told DHS that it had identified the killer as Brouillette, the department praised him: the officer "in question has nearly a decade of federal law enforcement experience with required training."

ICE would not confirm or deny that Brouillette was the officer involved, citing concerns about doxxing. But Ashley Brouillette says her ex-husband called her after the shooting, admitted to it, and asked her to lie about his character. She refused.

When he died, Guerrero was trying to get to work. His partner, Martha Karolina Rojas Alvarez, was in the car with their child. DHS claimed the driver "weaponized his vehicle toward law enforcement," but no public evidence supports that assertion.

This pattern extends beyond the agents themselves. The private prison companies that profit from Trump's immigration crackdown are now seeking the same legal immunities that shield police officers from brutality lawsuits.

GEO Group, the same company that employs Booth, the man who shot at protesters in Colorado, is currently asking a federal court to apply qualified immunity to a lawsuit alleging it forced ICE detainees to work for $1 a day or nothing at all. The case, dating to 2014, involves immigrants held at a GEO Group facility in Colorado. The company has spent more than a decade avoiding trial. A trial is now scheduled for this fall.

GEO Group is also one of the Trump administration's largest prison contractors and one of its most generous political donors. Its facilities have expanded significantly under the current administration's mass detention strategy.

When Booth shot at protesters in Aurora, a GEO Group spokesperson said the company would "fully cooperate with law enforcement." Booth was placed on unpaid administrative leave. His personally owned pistol was seized as evidence.

Inside ICE, the pressure to produce numbers is creating a feedback loop. A Guardian investigation in April found numerous agents hired without proper background checks. A former ICE official who served under Obama, Biden, and Trump told the paper that rushed vetting creates "higher risk of increased liability to the agency because of bad actions, abuse of power and the lack of ability to properly carry out the mission."

The former official was not being hypothetical. Brouillette is the proof.

The death toll keeps climbing. Human Rights Watch reports that at least 50 people have died inside ICE detention facilities since the start of Trump's second term. At least 10 people have been killed in field operations involving immigration agents.

The shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis, an unarmed mother of three, remains unresolved. The agent who shot her, Jonathan Ross, was quietly reassigned to a new role in a new state while the FBI investigation stalled. Minnesota had to sue the administration to force the federal government to hand over body camera footage and evidence. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced this week that the evidence had finally arrived, calling it "an important and meaningful step toward justice and accountability."

A senior ICE official told PunchUp in April that the FBI needed to "s--t or get off the pot" over the Good investigation. The official called this week's evidence handover "a good first step."

The question is not whether ICE's enforcement strategy is dangerous. The agency's own officials are telling investigators that it is. The question is why an administration that claims to care about public safety is deliberately staffing its deportation apparatus with people who have documented histories of violence and mental illness, pushing them to meet impossible quotas, and then defending every shooting that results.

When the official who spoke to PunchUp said agents should stop blocking vehicles and let people run, the message was clear: the people carrying out these operations know they are killing the wrong people, and they know the system is broken. The White House is ordering them to keep going anyway.

The question is why anyone is surprised.