ICE Brings The Occupation Home

On Monday, in the city of Biddeford, Maine, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in an SUV rammed the passenger side of a civilian vehicle and, after the vehicle stopped, approached it with their guns drawn. The driver reportedly was 26-year-old Colombian national Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, who was not the target of the warrant the ICE officers were supposed to be executing that day, and who had his three-year-old daughter in the car with him. Within moments, one or more of the agents fired at least six shots, at least four of which went through the windshield. As recorded on eyewitness video, the agents then pulled Durán Guerrero's limp body from the car and shackled his wrists. He did not survive. This killing—at least the 11th that agents of the nation's anti-immigrant death squads have committed in the U.S. since the start of Donald Trump's crackdown—has been met with public outrage, but nothing indicates that the federal government thinks anything went wrong at all. As is its custom, ICE told lies about its victim, calling Durán Guerrero an "illegal alien" in its statement and suggesting that agents slaughtered the unarmed man in front of his toddler daughter due to the threat he posed to public safety. Friday morning, the Associated Press published a lengthy story about the individual ICE agent believed to have fired the fatal shots. David Brouillette is 37 years old and, according to members of his own family who spoke to the AP, has been a known danger to the people around him for virtually his entire life. A long trail of family-court records portrays him as a violent, unhinged abuser of his former spouses and children, a stalker and harasser, a serial loser of jobs. A telling detail in the AP's story is that when in 2025 Brouillette told an ex-wife that he'd gotten a job with ICE, she assumed that he was, in the AP's wording, "having a mental health episode," and continued believing that was the case until she found out this week that he'd killed a man. Whether because of the kind of guy she knew him to be or because of assumptions she held about the U.S. government or both, the idea that she was hearing psychotic raving struck her as more plausible than that a federal agency had agreed to give her former abuser a badge and a gun.