ICE agents shot and killed a 26-year-old Colombian man in Biddeford, Maine on Monday morning while his toddler daughter, still in her Bluey pajamas, watched. Senator Angus King's office says the Department of Homeland Security confirmed to him that the man who died, Joan Sebastian Guerrero, was not even the subject of the warrant agents were supposedly serving. He was just a guy leaving his house.
What DHS Said Happened vs. What Witnesses Saw
The Department of Homeland Security put out a statement on X, the website formerly known as a place journalists trusted, that said agents were conducting "targeted surveillance" on a residence looking for an "illegal alien with a final order of removal." According to DHS, a vehicle fled the scene and an officer, "fearing for public safety," opened fire. The driver died.
That's the official version. Here's what witnesses told the press. A woman who saw the shooting told the Bangor Daily News that ICE agents rammed Guerrero's sedan, surrounded it with guns drawn, and ordered him out of the car. When he tried to drive away, at least one agent shot him. Another witness told the Portland Press Herald that agents pulled Guerrero from the car while he was still conscious, and that he said, "I tried to stop."
Those are two very different stories. One involves a dangerous fugitive fleeing law enforcement. The other involves a young father being rammed, surrounded, shot, and pulled bleeding from his car while whispering that he was trying to comply. The government has not explained how both can be true.
Not the Target. Not Undocumented. Just Dead.
Here is where this gets even uglier. The office of Maine Senator Angus King confirmed to The New York Times that DHS told them directly: Guerrero was not the person named in the warrant. He was not the subject of any enforcement action. He was, as best anyone can determine, a bystander to his own killing.
Immigrant rights activists told The Guardian that Guerrero had a Social Security number, was authorized to work in the United States, was married, and had a young child. The Guardian asked DHS directly about his immigration status. DHS did not answer. Colombia's embassy in Washington released a statement saying it "deeply regrets the death of a Colombian national" and has formally requested "information and clarification" from DHS about what exactly happened.
So to be clear about where we are: a federal agency shot a man who may have been legally present in this country, who was not the person they were looking for, and who by witness accounts was trying to stop when he was killed. And the government's response has been a post on X.
Eleven People Dead Since January 2025
Guerrero is the 11th person fatally shot by federal immigration officials since Donald Trump began his second term in early 2025, according to The Guardian's count. He is the fifth killed by ICE while in a vehicle. That is a specific and genuinely alarming pattern: ICE agents encountering people in cars, things going wrong, people dying.
Just one week before Guerrero was shot in Maine, ICE agents in Houston killed a Mexican man named Lorenzo Salgado Araujo while searching for a completely different person. Two people. Two weeks. Two wrong targets. And before either of them, two US citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were shot and killed by immigration agents in separate incidents in Minneapolis in January.
These are not isolated incidents anymore. This is a trend. Eleven deaths in roughly eighteen months is not a rounding error in federal law enforcement statistics. It is a body count.
A Little Girl in Pajamas and a Country That Shrugged
The Portland Press Herald reported a detail that you should sit with for a moment. Guerrero's young daughter was still in her Bluey pajamas when agents shot her father. Bluey, for anyone who hasn't spent time with a small child recently, is a cheerful Australian cartoon about a puppy family that tackles big feelings in gentle, funny ways. It is a show about parents who show up for their kids.
That little girl's father was shot in front of her by agents who were not even looking for him.
Protests have broken out following the killings of both Guerrero and Salgado, according to The Guardian, echoing demonstrations that followed the deaths of Good and Pretti earlier this year. The anger is not hard to explain. It is the accumulation of cases where the government cannot or will not provide a coherent explanation for why someone is dead.
The Dingo Take
The DHS statement about this shooting contains the phrase "fearing for public safety" as the justification for a lethal shooting. Think about that framing. An agent rammed a man's car, surrounded it with armed officers, and when that man tried to drive away from what must have looked to him like an extremely dangerous situation, the government's position is that the agent fired because he was afraid for the public. The public that was endangered, in this telling, was not Joan Sebastian Guerrero.
And the man was not even on any list. Senator King's office got confirmation directly from DHS: wrong guy. Guerrero had legal work authorization, a wife, a kid in cartoon pajamas, and a neighbor who could identify him by name. None of that saved him at 7 AM on a Monday in Maine. ICE rolled up to the wrong address, or the right address for the wrong reasons, and a 26-year-old man who said "I tried to stop" bled out on a street in Biddeford.
Eleven people dead. The government's transparency on each case has ranged from minimal to nonexistent. Colombia is asking questions the United States government has not bothered to answer. If this were happening to American citizens at this rate, at the hands of any other agency, Congress would already be holding emergency hearings. Instead, we are watching the death toll climb and waiting to see who number twelve will be.
