Healey renews calls to rein in ICE after fatal Maine shooting

Healey renews calls to rein in ICE after fatal Maine shooting
Daily Hampshire Gazette
By Contributing Writer
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BOSTON — Gov. Maura Healey said Tuesday she was “sick to her stomach” about a federal immigration agent shooting and killing a person in Maine the day before, and called for an investigation.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot a man in a vehicle Monday in Biddeford, Maine, according to the Department of Homeland Security. It was the second fatal shooting in a week involving an ICE agent firing into a vehicle, with the other one occurring in Houston.

The department said agents were conducting surveillance of the last known address of an individual who had been ordered to leave the country. ICE tried to conduct a vehicle stop, DHS said, and the 26-year-old Colombian man attempted to flee, when an agent shot and killed him.

Questions remain about whether the man who was shot was the intended target of the arrest warrant, and the New York Times reported that Maine Gov. Janet Mills and the city’s mayor have called for a full investigation of the killing. Healey joined her voice with theirs Tuesday, demanding an investigation and “accountability.”

“I spoke to Governor Mills yesterday and last evening,” Healey said Tuesday. “This has got to end.”

Healey’s comments on Tuesday echoed those she made after ICE agents shot and killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota earlier this year.

“I’ve said this for a long time, ICE and Trump — they need to call ICE back,” the governor said Tuesday. “What is happening is so, it’s so predictable. You’ve got people out there not trained, not wearing body cameras. They’re going after individuals, we’ve seen time and time again, they shouldn’t be going after.”

She reiterated that as the state’s former attorney general, she used to work with federal agencies including ICE, but drew a distinction between “put[ting] away bad guys” and “what is happening right now.”

“How is it that you have an individual shot dead in that manner, in front of his wife, his child, and all ICE can say is, ‘Sorry, we got the wrong guy.’ That’s not good law enforcement, folks. It’s shameful, and it needs to stop,” she said.

Trump administration officials on Tuesday told ICE officers to suspend most vehicle stops, people familiar with the decision said.

The suspension is not absolute and there’s room for exceptions when executing a criminal warrant or working with partner agencies, according to a person who spoke Tuesday on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive law enforcement operations. Matthew Felling, a spokesman for Maine Sen. Angus King, said the senator’s office was also told by the Department of Homeland Security that ICE was suspending vehicle stops.

Hundreds of people in Maine protested Tuesday over an ICE officer’s fatal shooting Monday of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian national.

DHS said Monday that the officer, “fearing for public safety,” shot and killed Durán Guerrero while officers were watching the home of someone they believed was in the U.S. illegally and had a final order of removal from the country. It said in a post on X that when ICE tried to stop a car driven by someone who came from the home, the vehicle attempted to flee and the officer fired his weapon.

That was a shift from how King described the encounter hours earlier, when he said Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told him the officer opened fire after the man tried to use his vehicle as a weapon. King said Mullin told him the officers were trying to serve an arrest warrant, but not for the man who was shot.

In a scathing post on X, outgoing Colombian President Gustavo Petro called the shooting a targeted killing “at the hands of the U.S. government.”

Petro, who has openly quarreled with U.S. President Donald Trump, urged Trump to provide an explanation and accused ICE officers of treating Durán Guerrero as “an inferior being without rights.”

The shooting sparked outrage among hundreds of protesters who gathered Tuesday outside of ICE detention center in Scarborough, just up the coast between Biddeford and Portland.

“These people are killers and they must leave our state now,” organizer Todd Chretien told the crowd, including some who held signs reading “Stop the murder” and “End this terror.”

Maine’s congressional delegation on Tuesday demanded a “comprehensive, transparent, and expedited investigation.”

Associated Press material was used in this report.

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