Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian worker in Biddeford, Maine, was shot and killed in his vehicle by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on the morning of July 13.
ICE agents surrounded Guerrero’s car with weapons drawn and rammed it with their own vehicles. Agents then fired at least four shots through his windshield before dragging him out of his vehicle, handcuffing his wrists behind his back as his body limply fell to the ground.
The Biddeford Gazette spoke with a witness who reported seeing two agents wearing green vests, and an unmarked white Ford Explorer with its lights on. He said the agents were shouting “very loudly and surrounded a white sedan with their weapons drawn.” The witness reported hearing four gunshots.
Agents supposedly mistook Guerrero for someone else, killing him less than a week after the murder of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo on his way to work by ICE in Houston, Texas, on July 7.
Guerrero leaves behind a wife and a three-year-old child. Both his father and others who knew him around the city as a food delivery driver have repeatedly attested that he was a friendly, caring man who loved his family, always ready with a laugh or a smile.
According to monopoly media, Democrat mafia-aligned Senator Angus King first said that Guerrero was the target of the operation but later backtracked on this, saying he was told by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin that Guerrero was not the intended target of the ICE operation.
Protests and vigils have erupted in the wake of the ICE murders. In Biddeford, activists brought hundreds of flowers to the location where Guerrero was executed. Thousands of protesters gathered in nearby Portland, Maine, chanting “ICE out now!”
The murders of Guerrero and Araujo come during an upsurge of ICE arrests since June, with a new arrest quota being set for ICE of 2,000 arrests daily. This number is higher than the averages seen during “Operation Metro Surge,” which was defeated by the large, combative resistance to the “shock-and-awe” campaigns during which federal immigration agents executed anti-ICE activists Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January of this year. ICE abductions since then have consisted of smaller, less visible operations to evade notice.
On July 14, DHS instructed ICE to cease traffic stops in an effort to prevent any further backlash. The next day, however, ultra-reactionary President Trump reversed this, reauthorizing traffic stops, which have consistently served as grounds for ICE to abduct and murder foreign-born workers.
Guerrero’s family set up a GoFundMe to cover legal expenses, funeral costs, and the repatriation of his body to Colombia here.
Image: Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. Credit: Justice and Support for Johan Sebastián’s Family on GoFundMe.
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