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The killing of 26-year-old Colombian immigrant Joan Sebastian Guerrero by ICE agents in Biddeford, Maine, has put the sparsely populated state back in the national spotlight amid the ongoing fallout from a sexual assault allegation that led insurgent Democratic nominee Graham Platner to suspend his campaign for Senate. The nomination will now be determined by Maine Democratic Party delegates in an accelerated — and more crowded — version of the race's contentious primary. Platner had been running to unseat longtime Republican incumbent Susan Collins, a supporter of Donald Trump and his administration's intensifying immigration enforcement policies. Protesters chanting "Vote her out!" marched to Collins's office after Guerrero's shooting was made public. Collins was the deciding vote to approve an additional $70 billion in federal funding for ICE last month. "Voters all across Maine, they don't think there is a way to reform this agency. They think it needs to be abolished," says Nathan Bernard, a Drop Site News correspondent in Maine.
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"They were hunting for Latinos." Outcry is continuing over the ICE shooting death of 52-year-old Mexican immigrant Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in a majority-Latino neighborhood in Houston, Texas, last week. Events pieced together by eyewitness videos and texts sent by the agents involved in Araujo's killing suggest that agents largely ignored Araujo's cries for help after he was shot. "They really just strung him along for hours until finally sending him to the hospital," says Juan Proaño, CEO of LULAC, the largest and oldest Latino civil rights organization in the United States. Meanwhile, the three men carpooling with Araujo to work are still languishing in ICE detention, where they were initially pressured to sign self-deportation orders. "But the fact of the matter is, we need them to stay in the United States. They are witnesses to a crime, and the only witnesses to what actually happened on that day."
Houston police have begun investigating the shooting as a homicide, "but my expectation is that their investigation will similarly be hampered by DHS," says Proaño. "I don't believe there will be justice here. There's no way to bring him back."
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The killing of a man in Biddeford quickly became an issue in the Senate race, with Democrats aiming to tie Senator Susan Collins to President Trump's immigration crackdown.
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A federal immigration agent shot and killed a man in a car on Monday morning in Biddeford, Maine. It was the second fatal encounter in a week involving an agent and a person in a vehicle.
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Lorenzo Salgado Araujo hoped to obtain legal status, his family said. He was killed last week by an immigration agent who was looking for a different man.
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