Tears. Outrage. Fury. Grief. Horror.
ICE is indeed the new Gestapo.
— Molly
The three-year-old girl, still wearing her Bluey pajamas, stood crying in the street, next to her mother, who had fallen to her knees screaming at the sight of her husband's body. He had been shot in his car by ICE agents on his way to work early Monday morning. Nearby a woman yelled, "You took her dad, you took her dad!”
Joan Sebastian Guerrero was still able to speak when they dragged him out, facedown on the pavement, and put the bleeding man in handcuffs. Daniel Boucher, 71, heard the shots from his apartment and went down to the street. "His face was bloody. His head was bloody," Boucher said, choking up. "I clearly heard the victim say, 'I tried to stop.' Clearly heard him say that."
Guerrero's wife knelt in the road beside him. Mary Hayes, watching from a window nearby, could not stop describing the sound the woman made. "I heard agony," she said. "I heard a howl that came from your soul, that your whole life had just changed and it was never going to be the same."
After he died, handcuffed in the street, his body would lie there for five hours.
Guerrero, a 26-year-old delivery driver from Colombia, was the sole provider for his wife and daughter. He held a Social Security number and legal authorization to work in the United States, according to the Maine Immigrants' Rights Coalition. He had been appearing at his immigration court dates.
Down the block from where he died is the laundromat he came to often, where the owner, Sadie Dilboy, knew him as the young man who always tidied up after himself and who brought his daughter along and handed her quarters for the candy machine. "He was such a good person," she said.
Joan Sebastian Guerrero was not even the man ICE was looking for.
The neighbors saw exactly how wrong everything went. Nelson Elias was woken by screams around seven o'clock. "I heard [the agents] telling him to park the car," Elias said. "It was really loud. Then all of a sudden they shot like 6 times, and it was just something hard to hear."
Mia Covino heard four or five shots and dropped to the floor of her home, then went to the window. Outside, the white car was spinning slowly in the intersection, and one of the agents -- believed to the one who had just shot Guerrero -- was hanging onto a door handle, yelling. The other agent was telling him to stop. To relax. To calm down.
Cory Poulin, who owns a laundromat across the street, believes the car was drifting because the man behind the wheel had already been shot. Em Akerley heard the first round from her kitchen, then five or six more, and reached her window in time to watch two agents chasing a car that "wasn't out of control that I saw."
"I don't know what he did," Akerley said, "but he didn't deserve to be executed in the street."
For nearly twelve hours after Guerrero was killed, the Department of Homeland Security said nothing publicly at all. It was talking to Congress, though. Within hours, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Senator Angus King that the man had used his vehicle as a weapon against the agents -- the same claim the department made in Houston, and in Minneapolis before that.
Mullin also told King the man was the target of the warrant. Hours later, he called the senator back to say that was wrong. He confirmed that the agents had been looking for someone else.
He never retracted the claim about the vehicle. But when ICE issued its public statement that evening, it was gone. DHS' statement did not use the language it has used time and time again when their agents have shot people in their cars -- it did not claim that Guerrero had weaponized his vehicle toward law enforcement.
It said only that an officer had discharged his weapon "fearing for public safety" as the vehicle "attempted to flee the scene."
The department's own use-of-force policy permits deadly force only against a person posing an imminent threat of death or serious injury, and warns explicitly against using it to stop someone who is fleeing. Fleeing is what DHS says Guerrero did.
Federal law enforcement officials, current and former, told CNN they were stunned. "Every law enforcement officer in America is scratching their head trying to figure out what that means," one said. Another was blunter: "When you want to arrest someone, this is a good example of how to do everything wrong."
In Houston, six days earlier, they told the same story.
ICE officers trailed a white work van carrying a construction crew and shot the driver through an open window. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was 52, a father of three, a business owner who had lived in the U.S. for more than three decades without a criminal record. He was not the target either. Agents believed a passenger resembled a man they wanted.
DHS said Salgado Araujo weaponized his van and tried to run over an officer. The men sitting beside him say an officer walked up to the open passenger window, said "Stop," and fired -- so close to his brother Victor's face that Victor thought he himself had been hit.
Twice in six days, federal agents executing an arrest warrant stopped the wrong vehicle and killed the driver.
In February, after federal agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, DHS announced that its officers would begin wearing body cameras. Congress appropriated twenty million dollars to buy them. Five months later, the agents in Houston had no body cameras and no dash cameras, and the agents in Biddeford had none either.
At the end of June, immigration agents arrested more than ten thousand people in five days -- better than two thousand a day, roughly double the pace of earlier this year and more than six times the rate before the Trump administration took office. The government denies in court that any quota exists. Its own officers say otherwise.
"All that matters is numbers, pure numbers," one ICE insider told the New York Post. "Quantity over quality."
King put the blame where he believed it belonged. "They've been told they have to arrest 2,000 people a day by the White House. That's a terrible way, an instruction, to give law enforcement. What happened today in Maine is a result of that."
Biddeford already knew what the quota looked like. In January, federal agents surged into Maine for an operation the Department of Homeland Security called "Catch of the Day," a joke about the state's fishing industry, and detained roughly two hundred people. Eleven of them had criminal convictions.
In recent weeks, neighbors said, ICE had been circling the streets around Pool and Hill in unmarked cars, past the bus stops and the schools. Barbara Malloch, who lives a block from where Guerrero was shot, was woken by the gunfire. "We don't want ICE here," she said. "They're killing people. They're not following the law."
We have seen this before. When an ICE agent killed Renee Good in January, the administration called it an act of domestic terrorism and said she had weaponized her car; video showed her turning away from the agent as he fired. When agents killed Alex Pretti days later, officials said he had come at them with a gun; he was holding a phone.
When the FBI opened a civil rights investigation into Good's killing, the Justice Department ordered it closed -- and pushed instead to investigate Good's widow. More than twenty federal prosecutors resigned rather than carry it out, including the acting U.S. attorney for Minnesota and six senior leaders of the Civil Rights Division unit that investigates police killings.
Three agencies are already investigating Joan Sebastian Guerrero's death: the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general, the FBI, and the Maine attorney general. The officer who killed him has been placed on leave.
As the federal government said nothing, the people of Biddeford took to the streets. By midday, hundreds were marching down Main Street, singing and banging drums, past the Pepperell Mill where generations of immigrants once worked. They massed outside Senator Susan Collins' office until the staff locked the doors.
They came with signs. "ICE is the new Gestapo," one read. "This is the government the founders warned us about," said another. A third: "You murdered a father."
In January, Guerrero posted this photograph of himself and his daughter to his Facebook page. Beneath it, he shared Psalm 37:1-4.
"No te impacientes a causa de los malignos, Ni tengas envidia de los que hacen iniquidad. Porque como hierba serán pronto cortados, Y como la hierba verde se secarán. Confía en Jehová, y haz el bien; Y habitarás en la tierra, y te apacentarás de la verdad. Deléitate asimismo en Jehová, Y él te concederá las peticiones de tu corazón."
"Do not fret because of evildoers, nor be envious of those who do injustice. For like grass they will soon be cut down, and like the green grass they will wither. Trust in the Lord, and do good; and you will dwell in the land, and feed on truth. Delight yourself also in the Lord, and He will grant you the petitions of your heart."
His daughter is three years old. She will grow up without him.
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Twice in six days, ICE stopped the wrong car, killed the driver, and made excuses. Neither shooting was filmed, and neither has been explained. That is a system, not an accident. Here's how to take action:
--> Call your Senators and Representatives at (202) 224-3121. Demand full, independent, and public investigations into the killings of Joan Sebastian Guerrero and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo -- and demand that Congress hold hearings, because the last time an ICE agent killed someone, the Justice Department shut the investigation down and went after the victim's widow instead.
Also demand that every immigration agent be equipped with a body camera. DHS promised them five months ago, after Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed in Minneapolis. Congress appropriated $20 million to pay for them. Not one of the agents in Houston or Biddeford was wearing one.
--> A GoFundMe campaign to help support Guerrero's wife and daughter has now been launched at https://www.gofundme.com/.../justice-and-support-for...
--> To support the coalition demanding an independent investigation of Guerrero's killing and the preservation of all evidence, visit the Maine Immigrants' Rights Coalition at https://maineimmigrantrights.org
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For children's books that encourage empathy and understanding of Mighty Girl immigrants of the past and present, visit our blog post, "A New Land, A New Life: 25 Mighty Girl Books About the Immigrant Experience" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=12855
For books for children and teens about the importance of standing up for truth, decency, and justice, even in dark times, visit our blog post, "Dissent Is Patriotic: 50 Books About Women Who Fought for Change," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=14364
For books for tweens and teens about girls living under real-life authoritarian regimes throughout history that will help them appreciate how precious democracy truly is, visit our blog post "The Fragility of Freedom: Mighty Girl Books About Life Under Authoritarianism" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=32426
To stay connected with A Mighty Girl, you can sign-up for A Mighty Girl's free email newsletter at https://www.amightygirl.com/forms/newsletter
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To read the Portland Press Herald's reporting on the killing of Joan Sebastian Guerrero -- including the scene at Pool and Hill Street, where his three-year-old daughter stood in her pajamas beside his body -- visit https://www.pressherald.com/.../immigration-agent-kills.../
For the Associated Press account, including Daniel Boucher's testimony that he heard Guerrero say "I tried to stop," visit https://apnews.com/.../ice-shooting-maine-immigration-dhs...
To read CNN's reporting on the Department of Homeland Security's twelve hours of silence -- and the reaction of federal law enforcement officials shocked by its statement -- visit https://www.cnn.com/.../maine-ice-shooting-houston-minnesota
For the New York Times' coverage, visit https://www.nytimes.com/.../biddeford-maine-ice-shooting...
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