MURDER MACHINE

How ICE Gunmen Exposed Their Moral Vacuum in a Few Callous Seconds

They shot Joan Sebastian Guerrero in front of his pajama-wearing daughter, threw him to the ground, then cuffed him.

Opinion

The tweeting of birds on a summer morning in Biddeford, Maine was interrupted by sounds of Trump’s America: Four gunshots fired by an ICE agent.

A witness then heard another sound: A cry from a mortally wounded 26-year-old Colombian immigrant from behind the wheel of a white Kia Ceed sedan.

”I tried to stop!”

ICE had been trying to arrest the man in—on their account— the mistaken belief he was the subject of an arrest warrant. He now sat silent and motionless as the Kia kept rolling in a slow circle at the intersection of Pool and Hill Streets in this small coastal city around 7:30 am. There were four bullet holes in the windshield. The driver’s side window was blown out.

“He tried to run me over!” the agent who had apparently fired the shots was now heard to say as he sought to stop the Kia by grabbing a door handle.

An ICE vehicle, also white, but a Ford SUV, pulled up and nudged the smaller Ceed to a stop. There were more sounds.

A little girl in Bluey pajamas with a pink backpack—the dead man’s daughter—stood crying in the street. A woman—his wife—was on her knees beside the girl, giving what an onlooker described as a soul-searing howl.

Two agents opened the driver’s side door and pulled the bleeding man from the car. He had the limp limbs of the newly dead. There was no supporting tension in his neck and his head made a hollow sound as the agents lowered him less than gingerly to the pavement.

Then they handcuffed him, while a third agent walked behind them, chatting casually on the phone.

In a video of the moment, the only sound was the birds continuing to tweet in the nearby trees.

Down in Washington, D.C., Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin initially told U.S. Sen. Angus King of Maine that the dead man had been the target of an arrest warrant.

Three hours later, Mullin was back in touch to tell King that he had been mistaken. The man was not a target.

Just last week, ICE agents in Houston shot to death a 52-year-old immigrant motorist who also proved not to be the target of a warrant. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was a 52-year-old Mexican construction worker who had lived in the U.S. for 35 years, raising three children, and putting them through college. ICE sought to justify the shooting by saying he had ”weaponized the vehicle” by trying to run them over.

The same justification was offered after an ICE agent killed 37-year-old Rene Good of Minneapolis seven months ago. But in that case, the agent had made a video with his personal cellphone which failed to show he was in danger, and recorded himself calling Good a “b---h” an instant before he opened fire.

There is no such video in the two more recent fatal ICE shootings. And in none of the three cases was the agents wearing body cameras.

In Biddeford, the proprietor of the Platinum Suds laundromat a few feet from where the Kia had come to rest told the Associated Press that the dead man had been unfailingly pleasant when he would come in with his daughter, sometimes giving the girl quarters for the vending machines.

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A neighbor named Daniel Bocher who had looked out this third floor window after hearing the shots and witnessed the immediate aftermath of the shooting told reporters he had distinctly heard the driver of the Kia Ceed call out “I tried to stop.”

Boucher reported that he had gone down to the street and chanced to lock eyes with the agent who had fired the shots. A shaken Boucher did not remember as distinctly what the agent said. But it was something to the effect that the dead man had tried to run the agent over.

His name was Joan Sebastian Guerrero. He was said by a local immigration group to have had working papers and a Social Security number.

In a statement, 12 hours after the killing, ICE said agents “attempted to conduct a vehicle stop. The vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon. The driver of the vehicle was struck, and emergency services were immediately contacted. He passed away from his injuries.”

Boucher summed up another Monday in Trump’s America, where the tweeting of the birds had been interrupted by gunshots, followed by a little girl’s sobs.

“Awful and surreal,” Boucher told the Daily Beast.

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Michael DalySpecial Correspondent

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