Bobby Charles, the Republican nominee for governor of Maine, has an explanation for the killing of a Colombian father by ICE in Biddeford this month: the state's refusal to help federal immigration agents. Maine's 'sanctuary policies,' he told the Maine Wire, forced ICE into the kind of independent field operation that turned deadly, and 'if we restore that cooperation, we will not have shootings like this' [3]. The documented facts of the shooting point somewhere else.
On the morning of July 13, agents surveilling a man with a removal order rammed a white Kia Rio and fatally shot its driver - who was not the man they were looking for [4]. Senator Angus King, briefed by the Department of Homeland Security, said the person killed 'was not the person that they were seeking' [4]. No agent wore a body camera [1]. The driver, Joan Sebastian Duran Guerrero, was a father in his mid-twenties [4].
The agent who fired was not, on the record, someone the agency should have been surprised by. An Associated Press review of court records and family accounts found that David Brouillette, 37, had years of documented domestic-violence allegations from two former partners when ICE hired him late in 2025 [2]. ICE defended him as having 'required training including use of force training' [2]. Whatever vetting preceded the hire either missed that history or set it aside.
The theory that state cooperation would have prevented this runs into the shape of the event itself. Maine is not a sanctuary state; it limits local police from enforcing federal civil immigration law, which ICE carries out on its own regardless [3]. The operation was federal, aimed at someone else, and executed by an officer whose record the agency's vetting did not stop [2][4]. Restoring local cooperation would not have changed who ICE was hunting, whom it hired, or whether its agents recorded what they did.
Some facts remain in dispute - including Duran Guerrero's immigration status, which his family and the Colombian government say was valid and which ICE has contested [4]. What is not in dispute is that a man ICE was not looking for is dead, shot by an agent it hired over a documented history of violence, with no body-camera footage of the moment [1][2][4]. The Maine attorney general, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general are all investigating [4]. 'Sanctuary policies' explain none of it.
