The ICE kills a man in Maine and admits he was not the person they were looking for

WashingtonThe second person shot and killed by anti-immigration agents in less than a week wasn't even the person they were looking for. The victim, shot Monday morning in Biddeford, Maine, was not the same individual against whom ICE had an outstanding deportation warrant, according to Senator Angus King, who cites the current Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS), Markwayne Mullin. In the official statement, the DHS did not mention this detail and limited itself to justifying the agents by saying they opened fire "fearing for public safety." It is not specified why the victim posed a danger. Monday's incident is similar to last week's in Houston, Texas, where ICE killed Lorenzo Salgado, a 52-year-old Mexican man who was mistaken for someone else.

The Maine victim has been identified as Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian man, according to neighbors who spoke to CNN. The Maine Immigrants' Rights Coalition and the group Presente! were the first to identify him and confirmed that Guerrero had a work permit and legally resided in the United States.

It was past 7 in the morning when this small coastal town of just over 24,000 inhabitants was surprised by the shooting. Several residents came out into the street alerted by the noise and saw federal agents running after a white car with bullet holes in the windshield. The man was already dead.

The government's first reaction did not arrive until 12 hours later, in a brief statement on social media where the DHS justified the action in self-defense and called Guerrero "an illegal immigrant", despite his status being different. Just as already happened in Minneapolis with the assassination of US citizen, Renee Good, the DHS clung to the fact that Guerrero was driving a car and that it could supposedly be used as a weapon against the officers.

The two new murders come half a year after the mass arrests in Minneapolis and which led to the death of Good and Alex Pretti, another US citizen, at the hands of anti-immigration agents. In total, since Trump began his mass deportation campaign, at least five cases of people have been recorded as dying at the hands of ICE, not counting Good, Pretti, Salgado, and Guerrero.

Both the assassination of Salgado last week in Houston and that of Guerrero yesterday in Maine have caused various local protests. The episode occurs under the new direction of Mullin, who replaced Kristi Noem after she resigned due to the chaos unleashed in Minnesota in January.

The last two incidents, in which the victim was mistaken, occur after last year a Supreme Court ruling opened the door to detentions based on racial profiling and the DHS shortened the training of new ICE agents to have more personnel on the ground. The recruitment campaign was designed with a narrative that called to defend the country "from invasion". As former ICE chief John Sandweg explained to ARA in January, "ideological recruitment is a recipe for disaster".