ICE Keeps Public Safe From 26-Year-Old Dad, In Front Of His Daughter In Bluey Pajamas
Witness heard shooting victim say 'I tried to stop' before he died.
For the second time in a week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has shot a motorist and claimed the killing was justified, although even in the first few hours following the killing, the official story about the shooting already changed. The latest ICE murder occurred shortly after 7 a.m. Monday in Biddeford, Maine, a small city southwest of Portland.
The shooting victim was identified by immigrant rights groups and by a neighbor as Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old immigrant from Colombia. The neighbor said she saw two women on the scene, with a little girl who was “no more than three” who she believed was Guerrero’s daughter. “She was still in her Bluey pajamas,” the neighbor said.
He worked as a food delivery driver, according to Madalynn Gagne, a staffer at the Applebee’s in Biddeford who said he would pick up orders there several times each week. She said he “would always ask if we needed anything. He was always just a good smile to see.” Clearly, one of those dangerous criminal aliens who have turned America into a living hell.
The Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and Presente! Maine said the man who was shot was authorized to work in the US and had a Social Security number, which likely means he had a pending asylum case moving through the system, as if that prevents DHS from arbitrarily deporting people. Or shooting them dead.
In a statement posted to Twitter last night, the Department of Homeland Security claimed (AP link) that agents had been doing surveillance on an address for a person who had been ordered deported, and that when officers saw someone leaving that address, they tried to stop the car. DHS claimed that the vehicle “attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon.”
The DHS statement contradicted what DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) earlier in the day. King said Mullin had told him in a phone call that the man who was shot had “weaponized his vehicle,” a familiar DHS lie whenever ICE or Border Patrol murders anyone in a car.
Law enforcement is only allowed to shoot at vehicles when the driver poses an immediate threat to officers or to the public, not to blast away out of a vague fear for “public safety.” The Supreme Court long ago made clear that shooting at someone just for fleeing is not legal.
After speaking with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Mullin has temporarily ordered ICE to stop conducting vehicle stops during immigration enforcement, not out of any concern for human life but because the publicity is getting in the way of the agency’s goal of arresting 2000 people a day. ICE will still be allowed to use vehicle stops “in cases involving the most dangerous targets,” an anonymous source told ABC News.
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Tellingly, the story from Mullin also included another whopper that the DHS Top Goon walked back in a subsequent call. In his first call with King, Mullin told the senator that the man had been targeted for deportation, but in a later call, a spokesperson for King said Mullin told King that “the victim of today’s federal law enforcement shooting was not the target of the warrant.” King is calling for a “full and transparent investigation,” but instead the shooting is being investigated by DHS’s inspector general’s office, which under Trump is no longer independent.
Sen. King also said that Mullin told him the agents in Biddeford were not wearing body cameras, so there’s no video of the the shooting from the thugs’ perspective. King said Mullin explained that while body cameras are being distributed to ICE agents nationwide, they apparently hadn’t yet made it to Maine. King added, “I am concerned. They should have been having body cameras two years ago when this whole thing started.”
A witness to the aftermath of the shooting, neighbor Daniel Boucher, told the Associated Press that he ran out of his house after hearing gunshots and seeing from his third-story window a small sedan being followed by an unmarked SUV. Here’s video of the AP interview with Boucher:
Boucher said the SUV hit the car twice before bringing it to a stop. He saw an ICE agent get out of the SUV and try, with some difficulty, to open the door of the car. Eventually the agent opened the door and pulled the man out.
“His face was bloody. His head was bloody,” said Boucher, momentarily choking back tears. “And I clearly heard the victim say, ‘I tried to stop.’”
Boucher said that he “was emotional and I just let him [the ICE agent] have it, and he looked at me and said, ‘He tried to run me over,’ or something to that effect,” although Boucher couldn’t recall the exact words. Not that an ICE agent would be predisposed to lie to anyone within earshot about such a thing.
Witnesses said that the man’s body and the blood that had drained from him were left in the street for hours.
The “weaponized his vehicle” lie is also what DHS claimed after last Tuesday’s killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, although witnesses to the shooting said Salgado Araujo hadn’t tried to hit officers and the fatal shots came from the side of his van. Contradicting ICE’s claim that Salgado Araujo had deliberately “rammed” an ICE vehicle, firefighters said his van hit an ICE vehicle after he had been shot in the abdomen.
The agents involved in the shooting of Salgado Araujo were also, by complete coincidence, not wearing body cameras. Following that murder, DHS insisted that its thugs in Houston didn’t yet have body cams “due to back-to-back Democrat shutdowns.”
In mere reality, Republicans had already thrown $175 billion at Trump’s deportation agenda in last summer’s Big Ugly Bill. Following DHS’s murder rampage in Minneapolis earlier this year, Democrats did attempt to force reforms on ICE, including a a requirement that agents wear body cams and clear identification, which led to a partial shutdown of the already lavishly funded agency. But instead of passing those simple reforms, Republicans instead used the budget reconciliation process to fund ICE and Border Patrol through the remainder of Trump’s term.
Days after the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January — or, in linear time, six months ago — then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said that the agency would “rapidly acquire and deploy” body cameras nationwide. In April, Congress passed $20 million in funding specifically for body cams, but as we note, the agency was already flush with cash that it could have used before then.
So no, it’s not Democrats who slow-walked the provisioning of body cameras.
As Sen. King pointed out to NPR this morning, the upshot of Republicans’ vote to fund ICE into 2029 means “there’s not even the power of the purse in this situation; they’ve already been forward-funded, which I’ve never seen before.” As a result, King said, ICE is “literally unaccountable” to Congress, leaving pressure from the public and from individual lawmakers the last remaining source of resistance to ongoing abuses by ICE.
King also called on the state of Maine to investigate the shooting, and to prosecute the officer if the investigation finds that he acted outside of the need to protect himself or the public from imminent danger.
He added that Americans need to ask why ICE is even in Maine in the first place. He noted that in an operation over the winter, ICE arrested more than 200 people in the state, only 19 of whom had any criminal record. “This isn’t about the ‘worst of the worst.’ The whole premise of this thing is phony.”
The murders, however, are all too real.
[AP / NBC News / Portland Press Herald / NPR]
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That was fucking heart breaking
fucking disgusting
This kid is dying apologizing for being murdered.
The Republican murder spree continues unchecked.