ICE Agent Accused Of Killing Young Dad Had Alleged History Of Abuse, So He Was Perfect For ICE
What happens when you have no standards at all.
So many questions remain unanswered in the horrific killing of Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, the immigrant food delivery driver who was shot in the head by an ICE agent on July 13 in Biddeford, Maine. While investigators are sorting out the specifics of the shooting, we are learning enough about the ICE agent accused of shooting Durán Guerrero.
All we can say about the agent, David Brouillette, is hoo boy. Folks, is it bad when multiple relatives of the agent, including his ex-wife and his daughter, are telling the Associated Press he “has a history of terrifying and violent behavior,” or that as recently as last year he left a voicemail for that same ex-wife saying she should have her throat slit? Because it seems bad!
Brouillette’s ex-wife Ashley — we should say first ex-wife, there are at least two of them — came forward when news broke. She had cut off contact with him late last year thanks to his abusive behavior, but not before he told her he had been hired by ICE. Her reaction? This, according to the AP:
She said that because of his long history of psychiatric issues, she thought he was having a mental health episode and she didn’t believe him. She didn’t realize he’d been telling the truth until this week, when videos began circulating online of the moments surrounding the shooting.
Ashley Brouillette went on to detail some of his past abuse of her, including throwing boiling water at her while she was holding their daughter. She also confirmed what another relative told the AP: that Brouillette was diagnosed with severe bipolar disorder and is “severely mentally ill.”
His second ex-wife also has had quite a time with him:
[H]undreds of family court records obtained from the Augusta District Court clerk’s office detail years of allegations of physical and verbal abuse raised by his second ex-wife on behalf of herself and his daughters. [...]
Brouillette tackled his teenage daughter and smashed spaghetti in her hair, and during another outburst, he dragged his daughter around the house as she cried, she said.
The anonymous relative also noted that Brouillette served in the military and deployed to Afghanistan for nine months around 2012. That, the relative said, “destroyed him.” The military “took someone who was extremely mentally ill and turned him into a killing machine.” Things were so bad that records show at one point he was collecting disability through the VA.
None of this is to excuse or denigrate Brouillette — we will save that for the people in the Trump administration whose policies and bloodlust allowed him to get hired in the first place. But it sounds as if this guy needed help. A lot of help. What he did not need was to be handed a badge and a gun and placed in a job that by its very nature runs on thuggery to begin with and has only gotten worse in the second Trump administration.
The stories of ICE brutality, aside from the murders of protesters caught on camera, have been numerous. Like this one. And this one. And also these. The administration’s mass deportation policy is having the predictable effect in terms of brutality and the caliber of people getting hired to carry it out.
We have known for some time that ICE, in its thirst to get out on the street and start busting immigrant heads, had been shortening and cutting corners in training its officers. Back in February, a whistleblower who had worked at the federal law enforcement training academy in Georgia resigned so he could testify to Congress that ICE was teaching its recruits to ignore minor niceties like constitutional rights and protections, no biggie.
The whistleblower, Ryan Schwank, had all sorts of interesting revelations. Such as that ICE had cut a requirement of 580 training hours by 240 hours and was teaching trainees that they did not need a warrant to bust down doors and drag suspects out of their homes.
It seems like just yesterday but was at least two, maybe three days that snarling galoot Tom Homan was telling an interviewer that ICE agents were being sufficiently trained, all evidence to the contrary. Since he said it to a Fox News host, he didn’t get any pushback.
We all know this attitude comes from Donald Trump, who thinks where law enforcement is concerned, every white person should get to be Charles Bronson in Death Wish if they feel like it. And it comes from Stephen Miller, the ridiculously powerful cut-rate Joseph Goebbels who has made ridding America of anyone whose skin is even a fraction of a shade darker than Benjamin Moore Super White his driving goal in life. Miller has spent the last 18 months riding immigration authorities hard, pushing them to round up and deport people at a clip unheard of since the US Army was herding Natives onto reservations in the late 1800s.
Our immigration authorities sure do love to shoot people they are not supposed to shoot! We look forward to the day when they face some consequences for it. Hopefully before they shoot anyone else.
[Associated Press / Portland Press Herald]
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That's who these guys are. We found that out in the Twin Cities, too. There are lots of videos floating around where locals encountered these guys, off-duty, going to bars and pizza joints etc.
Want Nazi tattoos? They've got 'em. Want guys with PTSD and early discharges from the military, who can't get hired by police departments anymore? It's these guys. They couldn't get hired to work in a school or a bank because their background checks would include lots of violence against women and children, not to mention bankruptcies and frequent job changes. They're not getting loans.
The overall profile is of undereducated men with untreated trauma producing unstable and violent behavior.
Exactly what you'd expect. Exactly the people who always staff expendable shock-troop positions, torturers, brutalizers. Every King, dictator, or extermination effort is staffed by these guys, down through history.
I read that Brouillette was told by a recruiter to stop using his mental health drugs for a year if he wanted to get in the army; and he did. Telling someone to go off their meds is reprehensible.