Neighbors in Biddeford, Maine heard six gunshots at 7:17 on Monday morning. A Ring camera caught the sound before anyone caught the story. By the time witnesses reached the intersection of Pool and Hill streets, federal agents in green police vests had a white sedan boxed in, its passenger side struck by an SUV, guns drawn on a driver who was already dying. One officer walked away from the car and started to cry. He came back only when a colleague said the man still had a pulse, and started CPR.
The man was 26 years old, from Colombia, and authorized to work in the United States, with a Social Security number to prove it, according to the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and Presente! Maine. He has since been identified as Joan Sebastian Guerrero.
Here is the detail that should stop you: ICE was not looking for him. Sen. Angus King’s office said Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told King directly that Guerrero was not the subject of the warrant the agents were there to serve. King’s office had initially said the opposite, on the government’s own earlier word, and had to walk it back once Mullin corrected the record. The United States government spent part of Monday unsure whether the man its officers had just killed was even the person they came for.
This already happened once this month
Six days earlier and 1,900 miles away, it happened to Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. ICE agents in Houston were, by their own account, looking for two people. Acting ICE director David Venturella later confirmed to Rep. Sylvia Garcia that Salgado Araujo was not one of them, and neither was his brother, who was riding beside him when the shot was fired. Reporting since the shooting has found the two people ICE actually had a warrant for were Guatemalan, and were not in Salgado Araujo’s van at all. Texas authorities had flagged a white van they believed was carrying people without legal status. ICE followed that van. The man driving it was not on any list.
Salgado Araujo had lived in the United States for 35 years. He had no criminal record. He was in the middle of the paperwork for legal work status. None of that mattered, because the agents who killed him were never looking at his file in the first place. They were looking at a van.
The video that finally surfaced didn’t settle anything
This publication reported nine days ago that Salgado Araujo’s family was still waiting for video of his death, and that DHS’s own investigative apparatus was structurally incapable of producing an answer anyone outside the agency could trust. Some video has since surfaced. It didn’t help much.
Surveillance footage obtained by KPRC 2 gave the clearest look yet at the final moments before the shooting, the moments ICE’s own statement had described as Salgado Araujo “ramming” an officer’s vehicle. A former U.S. Secret Service agent, asked to review it independently, said he could not determine from the footage whether the use of deadly force was justified. Passengers in the van, meanwhile, told reporters the shots came from the sides of the vehicle, not from in front of it, which is not consistent with an officer standing in the van’s path. Nine days of scrutiny, multiple camera angles, and an outside expert’s review, and the honest answer is still: unclear. That is what “we’re waiting for the video” gets you when the agency doing the shooting also controls what evidence exists and when it appears.
Two shootings, two agencies scrambling to hold their own government accountable
Maine’s response to Guerrero’s death has followed the same shape Houston’s did. Attorney General Aaron Frey opened a state investigation into a killing carried out by federal officers his office has no authority to discipline, subpoena records from, or compel to testify. Harris County’s district attorney did the same thing in Houston six days earlier, for the same structural reason: nobody else was going to.
Maine’s elected officials, at least, are being candid about how little they actually know. House Speaker Ryan Fecteau, whose district includes Biddeford, said the state deserves “answers about why lethal force was used and why an operation was being carried out in our streets”, a sentence that only makes sense if you register what it actually says: a sitting state legislator did not know a federal removal operation was happening in his own district until someone was dead. Gov. Janet Mills called the shooting “alarming and frightening.” Those are not the words of people who have been kept in the loop.
The pattern under the pattern
The thesis of this publication’s earlier piece on ICE shootings was that the agency investigates itself and, unsurprisingly, keeps landing on the victim instead of the officer. That’s still true. But Biddeford adds a second failure sitting underneath the first one, and it’s worse: twice in a week, federal agents used lethal force against someone who was not even the person named on their own paperwork. The accountability system these agencies are supposed to run on themselves cannot function if the agencies can’t reliably identify who they’re using force against in the first place. You cannot investigate your way to the truth about a shooting when the shooting itself was a case of mistaken identity that took the government most of a day to admit.
Guerrero’s family, like Salgado Araujo’s before them, is waiting for an investigation being run by people with every institutional incentive to make sure it ends quietly. Maine’s attorney general has no power to force the outcome any more than Harris County’s did. The video, when and if it comes, will probably raise as many questions as it answers, the way Houston’s did.
What’s different this time is that nobody on any side of this is even pretending it was the right person.