"Take Care of Us" - America, How Far You Have Fallen

Biddeford/Bucaramanga (KB) - Karolina Rojas has published a photograph of herself, her young daughter, and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. Beneath it, she wrote that she loved him, that he had been her everything, and that she could find no words for her pain. She begged him to watch over all of them and not leave them alone. On Monday morning, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed him at an intersection in Biddeford.

The Department of Homeland Security says the officer fired out of concern for public safety. The people who live in that neighborhood hear those words differently. There had been no threat whatsoever, resident Mary Hayes said, until they started shooting at a car in the middle of the street at 7:00 in the morning. Their neighborhood is a working class community where people get up on Monday mornings to go to work. It is a town built on work and old mills, she said, the heart of Maine.

That single statement contains the entire story. The danger the officers claim they were protecting the public from did not exist until they arrived. Before they got there, there was a man sitting in a compact car and people getting ready for the morning shift. After they arrived, there were bullet holes in a windshield and a dead man lying on the pavement. The agency describes the situation it created itself and then uses that description to justify its actions, a process that any rule of law state would recognize for exactly what it is.

None of those questions can be answered at this point because the officers were not wearing body cameras. It remains unknown how close the shooter was to the vehicle, whether anyone actually ordered the driver to stop, and what danger to the public the agency claims to have identified. The Maine Attorney General's Office, which is investigating together with federal authorities, states that according to initial accounts, the driver fled toward the officer. That already contradicts dozens of independent witness statements. The officer's name has not been released, and he has been suspended from duty. Daniel Boucher heard the wounded man say that he had tried to stop.

Public safety in America now means gunfire erupting on a quiet residential street. Attempting to flee now means a man saying he tried to stop. Whoever twists words like that is no longer governing reality, but the description of reality, and that is where the real danger to the public begins.

On Wednesday morning, the president doubled down. One of the agency's most important and effective crime fighting tools, traffic stops, must not be abandoned, he wrote in all capital letters. Just one day earlier, administration officials had instructed officers to suspend most traffic stops after the shootings in Maine and Houston one week before. That leaves the administration's own directive standing against the words of its president, while officers on the street are left to guess which one applies the next time they reach for a weapon.

Read also our article: ICE Suspends Vehicle Stops

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin refused to answer whether traffic stops would now resume and instead said the department's highest priority was protecting its own officers and removing criminals from America's streets. Anyone who is in the country illegally, he said, will be arrested and deported wherever they are found. They should leave now. Anyone who attempts to evade arrest places themselves in danger. That last sentence deserves attention because it is not a warning, but an announcement. Border czar Tom Homan urged everyone to wait for the investigation, saying officers would be held accountable if they had acted improperly or unlawfully.

Following those statements, legal action was immediately initiated in an effort to obtain a preliminary injunction. We are not going to let this go.

The agency then began describing the dead man. On Wednesday it announced that Durán Guerrero had been 25 years old and had entered the United States illegally through the southern border on September 1, 2023. Earlier, he had been identified as 26 years old. Our reporting, interviews, and humanitarian organizations contradict that account. He had possessed a valid work permit and had been living in the neighborhood with his partner and their young daughter. Senator Angus King said Mullin had told him the officers had been attempting to execute an arrest warrant that did not target the man who was killed. The department itself stated that officers had been conducting surveillance at the residence of a person under a final order of removal and intended to stop a vehicle leaving that address.

The sequence of those statements is revealing. First an officer fired the shots, then the department admitted it had killed the wrong man, and only afterward did it provide his date of entry into the country. His name had not even been recorded correctly, his age was wrong, and both had to be corrected by journalists and the Colombian Embassy before Homeland Security updated its own information.

A federal agency kills a man, discovers he was never the person they were looking for, and then begins searching through his paperwork. Not to explain why he was shot, but so it can later say that it had only killed an undocumented immigrant. But no missing passport stamp can justify that. If a government knows the exact day a man entered the country but cannot explain why he had to die, it has chosen the path of a terror state, one in which law and justice are suspended and a government agency decides who is allowed to live and who must die.

Read also our article: Enough - Shot Dead for Nothing: ICE Kills a Family Father in Maine Who Was Never Even the Person They Were Looking For

The numbers can be counted. At least 10 people have died since the beginning of the deportation campaign during operations conducted by the agency, at least 4 of them inside vehicles. John Sandweg, who served as acting director of ICE under Barack Obama, estimates there have been about 18 officer involved shootings during traffic stops under Trump. On Tuesday, a man in Florida died after fleeing officers and being struck by a tractor trailer. Republican Senator Susan Collins urged Mullin to suspend all nonessential traffic stops.

Governor Janet Mills called on Congress in a letter to force the agency to respect the rule of law before more families lose loved ones. If the agency cannot be fundamentally reformed, she said, then it is time to abolish it. Biddeford Mayor Liam LaFountain is demanding a permanent ban on traffic stops and asking why the officers involved were not wearing body cameras while his own police department has required them for nearly 10 years. An agency that receives billions of taxpayer dollars and still fails at such a basic responsibility has already condemned itself. The city is providing psychological counseling to the family and to affected residents, which says everything about what that morning did to the neighborhood.

We have now also spoken with the family in Colombia. Wilson Guerrero, an uncle of the victim, described the unimaginable cruelty of losing a son and nephew and called it simply heartbreaking and painful. His grandfather said Johan Sebastián had been murdered in cold blood. The 25 year old had lived in the United States for a little more than three years, driven there, according to his uncle, by the dream of building a better future before eventually returning to Colombia.

He worked as a cleaner and delivered food, occasionally helping out at a veterinary clinic, and he had obtained the permits and Social Security documentation needed to work legally and peacefully. His uncle said he had never feared immigration enforcement because he had done everything correctly and had obtained all of his paperwork properly. Most recently he had spoken about coming home for a visit because he missed family gatherings. He wanted to provide his daughter with a good education and help his parents. On Monday he left home on his way to work, where his shift was scheduled to begin at 7:30 a.m. They were already waiting for him outside. It was his wife who told the family what had happened. Immigration authorities had taken his life. She witnessed the entire incident and, according to his uncle, has been deeply traumatized ever since.

In Houston, Mayor John Whitmire is demanding that the Texas Rangers take over the investigation because federal authorities have jurisdiction and therefore control the evidence. Police Chief J. Noe Diaz Jr. has formally requested an independent investigation, while Whitmire is calling for a 90 day suspension of traffic stops. Meanwhile, the Harris County District Attorney's Office is attempting to secure special visas for three witnesses to the shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who had no criminal record and had lived in the United States for 35 years, in order to prevent their deportation. Daniel Tirado Pantoja, Jose Rojas, and Victor Salgado, the victim's brother, remain in custody and dispute the department's version of events. The decision on those visas rests with the very same agency that a federal court temporarily barred in May from detaining people with pending visa applications.

Read also our article: “You Tried to Run, Didn’t You?” - The ICE Agent Said as the Man Bled to Death

The extent of the silence is evident in Minnesota. Ramsey County has sued the federal government because the department has refused for months to provide information about the arrest of American citizen ChongLy Thao, who officers dragged out of his home in St. Paul during freezing temperatures in January. There is no question that the law was broken, Sheriff Bob Fletcher said. We are standing here and have heard nothing, said attorney Hao Nguyen.

Read also our article: The Long Fight Pays Off: Minnesota Finally Receives the Withheld Evidence

Colombia's outgoing President Gustavo Petro has called the incident a targeted killing carried out by the American government. At the family's home in Colombia, relatives gathered for a candlelight vigil more than 2,500 miles away from the intersection where blood could still be seen on the crosswalk later that evening.

Candlelight vigil at the family home of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Bucaramanga (Barrio La Victoria)

In the end, the question is who owns the streets. The government answers that question with a tool it continues to defend in all capital letters even as its own experts were trying to suspend its use. The people of Biddeford answer it differently. They say there was no danger that morning until danger arrived wearing tactical vests and carrying guns. And somewhere in that city sits a woman who posted a photograph of a happy family online and is begging a dead man to watch over them.

America, how far you have fallen.