Shortly after 7 a.m. on Monday, July 13, 2026, gunfire woke residents of Biddeford, Maine, a working-class coastal city of about 23,000. Witnesses saw federal agents chasing a white car with a windshield riddled with bullet holes. The driver, a 26-year-old Colombian national who according to immigrant-rights groups had a work permit and a Social Security number, was killed as he prepared to leave for work.
It was the second fatal shooting by immigration agents in less than a week in which they killed the wrong person. Maine's independent Sen. Angus King said that, according to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, the man ICE killed was not the person named in the warrant the agents were serving. Six days earlier in Houston, an ICE agent had fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, another man mistaken for someone else.
DHS said agents were conducting “targeted surveillance on the last known address of an illegal alien with a final order of removal,” that the man drove off, that agents tried to stop the vehicle, and that “fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon.” The statement did not address whether he was the target. Residents near the scene believe the driver had already been shot when agents chased the car, which was spinning out of control. The DHS Office of Inspector General said it would investigate.
Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, responded to the reports that the victim was not the target: “This development makes this tragedy even more disturbing and infuriating, and it underscores the reckless and haphazard manner in which immigration enforcement operations are being conducted in Maine and across the country. This has to end” (see ICE Agents Shot and Killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Houston Father of Three Driving to a Construction Job After 35 Years in the Country and Federal Immigration Officers Have Fatally Shot at Least 10 People Since Trump's Second Term Began).
Within a day the victim had a name and the shooting had consequences inside the agency. He was Joan Sebastian Guerrero, and his father told the New York Times his son had legal status; The New Republic reported he was shot while driving with his 3-year-old daughter. The Atlantic reported that the agent who fired was a recent ICE recruit, part of the force hired in the agency's rapid expansion. Late that night, ICE official Liana Castano emailed supervisors nationwide that “effective immediately, vehicle stops are suspended until further notice,” an extraordinary stand-down of the tactic that had now produced two mistaken-identity killings in a week. Trump ordered the stops resumed the next morning (see ICE Suspended Vehicle Stops After Its Second Wrong-Man Killing. Trump Ordered Them Resumed: 'We CANNOT Give Up... THE TRAFFIC STOP!').
Then the shooter was identified, by his own ex-wife. Ashley Brouillette named David Michael Brouillette, a former police officer turned ICE agent, as the man who killed Durán Guerrero, and said he called her afterward asking her to vouch for his character and back his account that the shooting was justified. She had seen the video. “He was asking me to lie for him and to cover for his character. I told him that I was not going to lie for him,” she said, adding: “In his head it's justified. He's unusually calm about it.” A second ex-wife sought a protection order against him.
What the women and those who knew him describe is a man who should not have carried a federal gun. NPR reported that his high-school nickname was “White Boy David,” that a former friend recalled him using anti-Black slurs and going out looking for fights, and that in 2022 child-protective services and police were called after he threw his then-13-year-old daughter through a glass coffee table; his ex-wife said he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and borderline schizophrenia, and that she had warned his military superiors about his mental health. “I worry racism may have played a part” in the killing, she said. The Atlantic had already reported he was a recent recruit, hired in ICE's rapid expansion, the vetting of which this shooting now tests in public.
The family is taking the government to court. Attorney Ben Gideon, representing Durán Guerrero's family, said he will sue the United States, arguing the agent's documented history of mental-health issues and violent behavior, including court records of alleged threats against an ex-wife, meant he “wasn't fit to work as a security guard, let alone as a federal agent enforcing immigration policy.” Brouillette has not been convicted of any crime.