Two men driving to a construction site before sunrise Monday were shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Biddeford, Maine. The Department of Homeland Security has since confirmed the victims were not the people agents were looking for.
Under the immigration enforcement surge ordered by Tangerine Cock-Womble, the operation was designed to apprehend a specific individual. That individual was not in the vehicle. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 25, and Joan Sebastien Guerrero, 26, were. They died at the scene.
“Our preliminary review indicates the individuals were not the primary subjects of the enforcement action, but their vehicle exhibited movements consistent with a potential threat,” a DHS spokesperson explained in a written statement. The statement described the outcome as an “unfortunate operational variance.”
The agent who fired the shots was identified by his ex-wife as David Michael Broulette, a former volunteer firefighter dismissed from his department for physical altercations with colleagues. She told the Portland Press Herald he called her after the shooting, admitted what he had done, and asked her to lie. She described him as “unusually calm.”
The Maine attorney general’s office released its own statement, noting it is “focused on a thorough truth-seeking investigation in cooperation with the federal agencies involved.” It did not address how cooperation might work with an agency that has, in a separate Minnesota case, refused for months to hand over evidence in two similar fatal shootings by ICE agents.
Those Minnesota deaths, of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, followed a roadblock-style intervention by unmarked vehicles. The families only recently learned that evidence had finally been forwarded to state prosecutors, a development one attorney called “a procedural minimum dressed up as progress.”
The broader context of accidental execution is now a documented feature of the immigration enforcement architecture. A recent internal DHS audit, portions of which were obtained by a nonprofit watchdog, found that over 17 percent of ICE street operations in the past fiscal year involved “contact with non-targeted individuals” resulting in “life-altering outcomes.” The agency reclassified those outcomes as acceptable collateral impacts in a January guidance memo.
