After the third ICE murder in a week, including at least two victims who were not even intended targets, the Department of Homeland Security continues to lie about what actually occurred.
In Biddeford, Maine, Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, in the U.S. legally, was killed Monday when ICE agents mistook him for someone else. Four bullet holes in his windshield suggest that trigger-happy agents killed him in cold blood. Video of the aftermath shows his car aimlessly driving in circles, with the driver presumably unconscious or already dead, and an ICE vehicle ramming it to bring the car to a halt, and then dragging out Guerrero’s limp body.
At first, DHS put out a story that the ICE agent opened fire after Guerrero tried to use his car as a weapon. A few hours later, DHS admitted that the officer mistakenly shot Guerrero in a case of mistaken identity while officers were watching the home of someone else whom they planned to arrest. DHS claimed in a post on X that when ICE tried to stop a car driven by someone who came out of the house, the officer fired his weapon, “fearing for public safety.” The usual improvised BS.
By Tuesday, in an effort at damage control, Trump officials told Maine Sen. Angus King that ICE has been ordered to suspend nearly all traffic stops. This follows a too-familiar pattern, where token adjustments are made and nothing really changes.
After the killings in January in Minneapolis of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Democrats in Congress blocked multiyear funding for ICE. The administration fired two of the most visible faces of ICE excesses, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol “commander-at-large” Greg Bovino. Incoming DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said during his confirmation hearing that reforms would be forthcoming, but none have. Agents still don’t even wear body cameras. In June, Republicans rammed ICE funding through Congress with no reforms.
The proof is the continued killings—three in a single week, plus at least 19 deaths in ICE detention facilities. In Houston on July 7, an ICE agent killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a legal Mexican immigrant in the U.S. for three decades, during a traffic stop. He was not the intended target of the ICE operation, federal officials later admitted.
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And in Florida on Tuesday, a still unidentified man had an encounter with ICE agents at a gas station. He tried to leave, and was killed on the highway by an oncoming tractor trailer. It has not yet been disclosed whether he was the target of an ICE operation, or another case of mistaken identity.
Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare, the top prosecutor for Houston, said that the actions of federal immigration agents “in no way resemble” the tactics of “every law enforcement agency” he’s worked in. “Either these agents are completely untrained, or intentionally putting themselves in situations where they can justify firing into cars.”
Even after Secretary Mullin was posturing to reassure people in Maine, other administration officials were boasting that nothing had changed. Tom Homan, the White House border czar, said the order was only “a short pause just to make sure we’re doing the right thing,” in an interview with Fox News. “Operations continue. Arrests are at record numbers. Deportations are at record numbers.”
President Trump then explicitly directed ICE to reverse the suspension and let traffic stops continue. In posts on social media Wednesday morning, Trump declared that giving up traffic stops “won’t happen on my watch.” He later added: “[W]e must be strong, tough, and smart, and we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP! Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands.”
As usual, the administration can’t get its story straight. And as for damage control, one form of damage is beyond control. Just as Maine Democrats were struggling to get beyond the fallout from the Graham Platner mess and seek energized unity in the general-election campaign against incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins, ICE came to the rescue. Collins, just last month, voted another $70 billion for ICE and other Homeland Security agencies, with no reforms or restrictions.
