On Monday, in the city of Biddeford, Maine, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in an SUV rammed the passenger side of a civilian vehicle and, after the vehicle stopped, approached it with their guns drawn. The driver reportedly was 26-year-old Colombian national Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, who was not the target of the warrant the ICE officers were supposed to be executing that day, and who had his three-year-old daughter in the car with him. Within moments, one or more of the agents fired at least six shots, at least four of which went through the windshield. As recorded on eyewitness video, the agents then pulled Durán Guerrero's limp body from the car and shackled his wrists. He did not survive.
This killing—at least the 11th that agents of the nation's anti-immigrant death squads have committed in the U.S. since the start of Donald Trump's crackdown—has been met with public outrage, but nothing indicates that the federal government thinks anything went wrong at all. As is its custom, ICE told lies about its victim, calling Durán Guerrero an "illegal alien" in its statement and suggesting that agents slaughtered the unarmed man in front of his toddler daughter due to the threat he posed to public safety.
Friday morning, the Associated Press published a lengthy story about the individual ICE agent believed to have fired the fatal shots. David Brouillette is 37 years old and, according to members of his own family who spoke to the AP, has been a known danger to the people around him for virtually his entire life. A long trail of family-court records portrays him as a violent, unhinged abuser of his former spouses and children, a stalker and harasser, a serial loser of jobs. A telling detail in the AP's story is that when in 2025 Brouillette told an ex-wife that he'd gotten a job with ICE, she assumed that he was, in the AP's wording, "having a mental health episode," and continued believing that was the case until she found out this week that he'd killed a man. Whether because of the kind of guy she knew him to be or because of assumptions she held about the U.S. government or both, the idea that she was hearing psychotic raving struck her as more plausible than that a federal agency had agreed to give her former abuser a badge and a gun.
The lax screening and hiring practices the Department of Homeland Security has used to fill out its ethnic-cleansing wing were the subject of public alarm long before the second Trump administration kicked off a headlong effort to staff up on violence workers. Far from sieving for the most qualified, capable, or reliable possible candidates, ICE is known to all but throw a job at any braindead former high-school bully who can be enticed by a sign-on bonus, and who isn't troubled by the appalling nature of ICE's work or the public's widespread loathing of the creeps who do it. The agency's job requirements start and stop at willingness to inflict harm; its standards for hiring can only vaguely be said to exist, and its training program is all but nonexistent.
In that way, ICE acts as the drain filter at the absolute bottom of the American violence industry, catching, hiring, and deploying as a paramilitary force otherwise unemployable degenerates whose next stop on their lifelong quest to shed blood and terrorize vulnerable people would be a mass shooting at a parade. Instead these men are driving around America's streets with a mandate from the president and a promise of federal immunity for whatever they do, held back by nothing but the possibility that someone nearby might have their camera ready.
The drumbeat of ICE killings represents to the rest of us the onshoring of a longstanding American tradition, of putting deadly weaponry and license to kill in the hands of too many men who, by dint of their eagerness for those things, mark themselves as the last people who should have them, and sending them out into the cities and towns of people who do not want them there. It's the panicked, violence-first logic of America's two-decade occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, but without any of the discipline or order of the actual military as it exists. Manifest slipshod assembly, mindless offhand destruction, and criminal irresponsibility are where today's ICE most clearly bears Donald Trump's fingerprints—but like nearly everything else bearing them, he didn't create it. He just made it worse.
Another telling detail in the AP story is that when Brouillette, as a younger man, tried to join the military, recruiters turned him away because of his mental health record ... and advised him to stop taking his psychiatric medications for a year and try again. This was not because anyone believed that going off his medications would somehow transform Brouillette from an unstable, extremely mentally ill man into someone psychologically healthy and qualified to carry a deadly weapon among civilians. It was because a provable claim that he hadn't been medicated for his severe diagnoses in over a year would enable the recruiters to sign that deeply mentally ill and unstable man up to do violence work in a uniform. After that, he'd be the problem of faraway overseas civilians.
That was in 2010, when the military was taking pretty much anybody it could get, and the sheer illogic of throwing violence at a problem the U.S. had caused was outpacing the value of having a military that worked as it's supposed to work. After a stint in the Marine National Guard, Brouillette did eventually join the Army. He served as a human intelligence gatherer (a noncombat role) in Afghanistan from 2012 to 2013.
What Americans are seeing now, in the death of Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero—as in the deaths of Renee Nicole Good, Alex Pretti, and 52-year-old Houston construction worker Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, killed earlier this month—is already familiar to tens or hundreds of millions of people around the world. This is what it is like for your home to be occupied by the American death machine. It looks like David Brouillette, and the bore of a gun.
