The Second ICE Killing in Two Weeks. The Second Wrong Person. The Second Cover-Up.
Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was 26 years old. He lived in Biddeford, Maine. He was legally authorized to work in the United States, according to the Maine Human Rights Coalition. He is dead because federal immigration agents shot him.
Immigration agents fatally shot the 26-year-old Colombian man in Biddeford, Maine. Sen. Angus King’s office was unambiguous: Guerrero was “NOT the target” of the ICE immigration operation. ICE claimed the shooting was necessary to protect public safety. The Trump administration did not preserve the crime scene and has refused to cooperate with Maine State Police or local authorities to launch a joint investigation.
Two weeks ago in Houston, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot while driving to a construction job. ICE was looking for two Guatemalans. He was Mexican. He drove a white van. They stopped the wrong one. He is dead. The witnesses are being pressured to self-deport. The crime scene was not preserved.
Now Biddeford.
A man who was not the target. A legal worker. Dead. No crime scene preserved. No cooperation with local law enforcement. No joint investigation. The pattern is not accidental. It is a policy.
Senator Susan Collins of Maine voted for the latest round of additional funding for DHS and ICE. She was the deciding vote. Without her vote, the funding did not pass. With her vote, it passed. The agents who shot Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine are funded in part by Susan Collins’s yes vote.
Collins said she was “deeply troubled” by the shooting. She did not say she regretted the vote. She did not say she would reconsider future funding. She said she was troubled. Troubled is the word politicians use when they want credit for noticing without paying the cost of acting.
The Pattern That Isn’t a Coincidence
The Houston shooting. The Biddeford shooting. The ICE killing of Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis in January. The pattern of wrong targets, absent body cameras, unpreserved crime scenes, and refused cooperation with local law enforcement is not a series of coincidences. It is a consistent operational approach.
The administration that dismantled the civilian harm mitigation program at the Pentagon — the program specifically designed to prevent the killing of the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time — is running the same approach through ICE. Act fast. Don’t record. Don’t cooperate. Deport the witnesses. Issue a statement. Move on.
Mexican President Sheinbaum called for criminal probes into the deaths of Mexicans in the U.S. The Mexican government is demanding criminal investigations into deaths that the American government refuses to investigate jointly with its own state and local law enforcement.
The Trump administration did not preserve the crime scene for investigators and has refused to cooperate with Maine State Police or local authorities to launch a joint investigation.
This is not policing. This is not immigration enforcement. This is a militarized operation conducted without accountability, without transparency, without body cameras, and without cooperation with the law enforcement entities that exist precisely to investigate when people are killed.
The tenth and eleventh deaths at the hands of federal immigration agents this year. The calendar reads July 15th. We are not halfway through the year.