ICE Agent Who Killed Maine Man Was Hired Despite Record of Abuse, Family Says

A new report has revealed that the ICE agent who fatally shot a Colombian resident of Maine earlier this year was hired by the federal agency despite his history of racist and violent behavior.

According to reporting from The New York Times, David Brouillette — who has been identified by his family members and ex-partners as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent who killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in July — sent emails to his family members years ago, disparaging his sister’s marriage to a Colombian man using racist terms.

In one such email in 2020, Brouillette told his sister, Elizabeth Emen, that her husband should “[take] his non citizen ass back to his country and enjoy his third world luxuries.” He also called her husband “entitled,” and said that his brother-in-law’s “bloodline knows nothing about what it takes to earn and then CHERISH the freedom America offers.”

Emen’s husband was a Ph.D. student whose residency in the U.S. was legal when Brouillette authored those messages.

The Times’s reporting also delved into Brouillette’s court records, noting that two ex-wives have accused him of physical abuse. Brouillette has also given false statements while in court, claiming in one instance that he was a police officer in Maine when, in reality, he had only applied for the job and was later denied it.

Brouillette has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and has been hospitalized multiple times, family members told the publication. That kind of history is typically supposed to disqualify applicants from being hired by ICE.

Brouillette reportedly longed to be in a law enforcement role for years, including as a teenager, as evidenced by his online screen name at the time, “citizensoldier22.” He briefly served in the U.S. military, and upon returning from Afghanistan, admitted to his then-wife that he regularly employed racial profiling while abroad.

One of his ex-wives, upon learning that Brouillette had killed Guerrero, told local media that she had spoken with him about his joining ICE earlier this year, initially believing he was being “delusional” about the idea, given his history of violence and mental health issues. After the fatal shooting, she told the press that she had asked herself: “How do you keep getting into these jobs where you’re around guns all the time?”

Emen also recounted feeling disbelief at the idea that her brother had been recruited by ICE.

“When I saw his actions on July 13, I just couldn’t believe that it had been allowed to get to that point. I can’t believe that he was onboarded into a federal agency and provided a weapon,” Emen said in a statement to ABC News.

Susan Bedard, Brouillette’s mother, told the Times that her son “is dangerous and should not have weapons.”

“Believe his victims, not him,” Bedard added.

Brouillette has not yet faced any charges for his role in Guerrero’s killing. He has told a local sheriff’s office that he is currently under “executive protection.”

Brouillette’s hiring is no anomaly, as ICE has relaxed many of its hiring standards in an attempt to recruit thousands to carry out the Trump administration’s brutal immigration policies. Indeed, ICE has been employing alarming methods to recruit far right zealots, including sharing neo-Nazi memes on social media and seeking out potential hires at gun shows, Ultimate Fight Club shows, martial arts centers, and other locations where men with such views tend to frequent.

Several scholars have said that reforming ICE isn’t enough to restrain the agency’s violence, noting that “reforms” to policing in 2020 ultimately served to uphold the status quo.

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, author of Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana, and a professor of geography and African American & Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky, called for the abolition of ICE in an op-ed for Truthout earlier this year.

“The liberal conceit that racism and brutality can be trained out of law enforcement has been a hallmark of the Democratic narrative since at least the Kerner Commission response to the 1960s urban uprisings,” Pelot-Hobbs wrote. “Yet such an approach has proven over and over again to not stem the tide of police violence but to validate the centrality of policing in U.S. society.”