His neighbor heard the screams around 7 a.m. Then officers shouting at a driver to park the car. Then roughly six gunshots.
When Nelson Elias walked outside his Biddeford home Monday morning, he found his neighbor of two years dead on the ground — his wife screaming beside him, their young daughter watching.
There comes a point when statistics stop meaning anything.
Another name. Another grieving family. Another child whose life will forever be divided into before and after.
A little girl stood nearby in her Bluey pajamas as her mother collapsed to her knees, crying out in the unbearable agony that only comes from watching the person you love die.
That little girl will never forget that sound. She will never forget that day.
Long after the headlines disappear and the political arguments move on, she will still be carrying that memory.
Whatever someone’s views are on immigration, we should all be able to agree on this: children should not have to watch their fathers die.
If the answer to every tragedy is simply, “He shouldn’t have been here,” then we’ve stopped talking about human beings.
We’ve started treating lives as disposable, as though a person’s worth depends entirely on the paperwork they carry.
Thirty-five years in America. Twenty-six years old. Fathers. Mothers. Husbands. Wives. Sons. Daughters.
These are not just immigration stories.
They are family stories.
They are stories about empty seats at dinner tables, birthdays that will never feel the same again, and children who will grow up asking why their dad never came home.
Politics should never require us to surrender our humanity.
We can have debates about border security. We can debate immigration laws, visas, deportations, and public policy.
Democracies are supposed to have those debates.
But if we lose our ability to feel compassion for the people caught in those policies, then we’ve already lost something much bigger than the argument.
Because every time a child watches a parent die, America loses a small piece of its soul.
And no political victory is worth that.
The man ICE killed at the corner of Hill and Pool streets was 26 years old.
Most outlets, citing neighbors and Maine officials, identify him as Joan Sebastian Guerrero; The Washington Post, citing a Colombian embassy official and friends in his building, reports his full name as Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero.
He cleaned buildings and delivered food.
He was raising a small child with his partner.
According to the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and Presente! Maine, he was authorized to work in the United States, had been issued a Social Security number, and was on his way to work when he was killed.
He also wasn’t the person ICE came for.
That’s not speculation — it’s the government’s own admission.
What happened in the Biddeford ICE shooting
According to the Department of Homeland Security, ICE agents were conducting surveillance at an address linked to a person with a final order of removal.
When a vehicle left that address, agents moved to stop it. DHS claims the driver tried to flee and that, “fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon.”
The official story shifted within hours.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin first told Sen. Angus King that the man had a deportation order and had “weaponized” his vehicle (the same reason ICE/DHS gave for the shooting of Renee Good, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and others).
By evening, Mullin was telling King something the department’s public statement conveniently omitted: the man who died was not the target of the warrant.
ICE came to Biddeford for one person and killed another. The same thing happened in Houston. They went there looking for one person and killed another — a Houston father of three.
Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey’s office, which is running a state investigation alongside the FBI and the DHS inspector general, said preliminary evidence suggests the driver attempted to flee in the direction of the officer.
The officer is on administrative leave.
But surveillance footage obtained by the Boston Globe and the Associated Press complicates the picture: it shows a white sedan moving in slow circles at the intersection before another vehicle blocks it in and agents pull the driver out.
According to the description of the video on the Associated Press YouTube channel, the video, “shows the shooting”. Rather than speculating about what I saw, this is how reporters describe the video on other news outlets .
The Interception: Guerrero’s vehicle is seen driving slowly down the street when an unmarked law enforcement SUV pulls out from a side street to block him.
The Maneuver: After a tree temporarily blocks the camera’s view, the sedan turns around, and the SUV maneuvers behind it to block it in, potentially colliding with the car’s bumper.
The Aftermath: Agents run to the driver’s side door. After opening it, the footage shows agents removing Guerrero’s limp body from the driver’s seat and onto the pavement.
The agents were not wearing body cameras, so the public may never see an independent account.
Timeline: How the day unfolded
- ~7:00 a.m. Monday — Shooting at Pool and Hill streets. Biddeford police confirm ICE personnel were involved. Neighbors describe shouting, then a burst of gunfire.
- 8:00 a.m. — A dispatcher confirms to News Center Maine that a person was shot by ICE agents.
- 8:15 a.m. — Maine House Speaker Ryan Fecteau, a Biddeford Democrat, posts on social media that a person was killed, ICE was involved, and state police are on scene — the first official confirmation the public got.
- Morning — Streets around the intersection are blocked off; a red crime scene tent goes up.
- 12:00 p.m. — Sen. Angus King, speaking to reporters at the Portland jetport, relays Mullin’s initial “weaponized vehicle” account, demands a fully transparent investigation, and reveals the agents wore no body cameras.
- 12:20 p.m. — The FBI confirms it is investigating.
- 1:00 p.m. — Roughly 100 protesters gather at Mechanics Park, marching at one point to Sen. Susan Collins’ Biddeford office.
- Afternoon — AG Frey’s office confirms an ICE agent fatally shot the driver while serving a deportation order.
- Evening — DHS breaks hours of silence with its brief public statement. Mullin reverses himself to King: the dead man was not the warrant’s target. Hundreds attend a vigil and march near Mechanics Park, carrying flowers and signs — one at the memorial reads, “Immigrants make Biddeford great.”
- 10:40 p.m. — Biddeford Mayor Marty LaFountain commends residents for gathering peacefully: “This has been a deeply difficult and painful day in Biddeford.”
- Tuesday — ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations agents are directed to suspend most vehicle stops until further notice, a major tactical reversal after two deadly shootings in a week. The city of Biddeford, partnering with mental health provider Sweetser, offers free crisis support sessions to anyone affected. About 100 people protest outside the ICE facility in Scarborough.
Politician reactions — on X and off
Gov. Janet Mills released a statement on X after the shooting. Then later, in another post on X, she said the revelation that Guerrero wasn’t the target “makes this tragedy even more disturbing and infuriating” — evidence, she wrote, of reckless, haphazard enforcement in Maine and nationwide that has to end.
Sen. Susan Collins
To be fair, Collins just posted again:
Rep. Chellie Pingree
Rep. Jared Golden
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries
At Monday night’s rally, Hannah Pingree, the Democratic nominee for governor, told the crowd that a 26-year-old father had been shot by his own adopted country and pressed for a Maine-led investigation rather than one controlled by Washington.
Protester Katie Barrow was more blunt, telling NBC Boston: “A badge and a gun are not a license to kill.”
No cameras — and a recycled excuse
DHS blamed the missing body cameras on two government shutdowns it attributed to Democrats, promising the remaining field offices would get cameras within 60 days.
If that sounds rehearsed, it is: CNN found the statement nearly identical, word for word, to the one DHS issued after officers without cameras killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston six days earlier.
And back in February, then-Secretary Kristi Noem publicly pledged a rapid nationwide camera rollout.
Five months later, the officers who killed Guerrero still didn’t have them.
He knew what ICE was capable of
Perhaps the cruelest detail: Guerrero saw this coming.
In January, after an ICE officer killed Renee Good — an unarmed U.S. citizen shot in her car in Minneapolis, in another case where DHS claimed a vehicle had been “weaponized” — Guerrero responded on Facebook to a fundraiser for the officer who shot her.
“Sadly, here they pay you to kill a person,” he wrote, in a post CNN verified from his account. 😢
Six months later, the same justification would be made for his own death.
The pattern behind the killing
The Bangor Daily News counts Biddeford as at least the 11th fatal shooting involving an ICE or Border Patrol agent since Trump took office last year.
The Wall Street Journal identified more than a dozen incidents in a six-month span in which federal immigration officers fired at people inside vehicles.
It’s happening because White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and DHS leadership have pushed ICE to arrest 2,000 people per day, roughly doubling the pace of arrests in a matter of weeks.
People are dying at the other end of the pipeline, too.
Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights documented 52 deaths in ICE custody in the first 500 days of this administration, with the annual mortality rate up roughly 140 percent year over year.
Resist Hate has reported what those numbers look like on the ground at Camp East Montana, where overcrowding, disease outbreaks, and medical neglect have already proven fatal.
A quota has a body count.
Biddeford learned that Monday morning, when a young father died on his way to work — killed in front of his family by agents who weren’t wearing cameras, executing a warrant with someone else’s name on it.
His wife and daughter deserve answers. So does everyone living under an agency that treats “he tried to flee” as the last word instead of the first question.
