Joan Sebastian Guerrero was 26 years old. He was from Colombia. He had authorization to work in the United States. He had a Social Security number. He was not the target of the warrant ICE agents were trying to execute.
This morning, in Biddeford, Maine, an ICE officer shot and killed him anyway.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, agents were conducting surveillance on a residence associated with someone who had a final order of removal. A person left the residence in a vehicle. Agents attempted a vehicle stop. The vehicle attempted to flee. An officer, "fearing for public safety," discharged his weapon. Guerrero was found fatally shot. The agents were not wearing body cameras.
This is the second fatal ICE shooting in six days. On July 7, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo — a 52-year-old Mexican man who had lived in Houston for years, built houses, started his own business, and had no criminal record — was shot and killed by an ICE agent while driving his construction crew to a job site. He was not the target of the operation either. DHS claimed he tried to ram an officer with his vehicle. Witnesses and his passengers dispute this account. The Harris County medical examiner ruled his death a homicide.
These are not isolated incidents. They are part of a pattern that should alarm every American, regardless of where you stand on immigration.
The Numbers
Since January 20, 2025, federal immigration agents have been involved in at least 39 shooting incidents, resulting in at least 9 deaths. At least five of the people shot were United States citizens.
In January 2026 alone, two people were killed by immigration agents in Minneapolis during Operation Metro Surge — an enforcement blitz that resulted in more than 3,000 arrests and drew criticism for warrantless arrests, aggressive clashes with protesters, and the detention of American citizens.
Renee Good, 37, an American woman, was shot three times and killed on January 7 after agents surrounded her car. She was seated in her vehicle, which was stopped sideways in the street. As she began to move the car forward and to the right — away from the agent — the officer fired three rounds from several feet away. She died at the scene.
Alex Pretti, 37, was an intensive care nurse at the VA Medical Center. On January 24, he was filming federal agents with his phone and directing traffic near an enforcement operation. He stepped between an agent and a woman the agent had pushed to the ground. He was pepper-sprayed, wrestled to the ground by multiple agents, and then shot and killed while surrounded by approximately six federal officers. He was an American citizen exercising his First Amendment rights.
In addition to the shooting deaths, at least 32 people died in ICE detention facilities in 2025 — the highest number in two decades. Six more have died in custody so far in 2026.
These numbers represent human beings. People with families, jobs, communities, and in many cases, the legal right to be in this country.
The Accountability Gap
Here is what makes this pattern especially dangerous: there is almost no accountability.
Federal agents involved in these shootings are not required to wear body cameras. In the Maine shooting this morning, they weren't wearing them. In the Houston shooting last week, the account provided by DHS has been contradicted by witnesses and video evidence. In the Minneapolis cases from January, Minnesota prosecutors had to sue the federal government to obtain evidence — and as of today, over six months later, no federal charges have been filed against any of the agents involved.
When local police officers use lethal force, there are protocols. Internal affairs investigations. Body camera footage. Grand jury proceedings. Independent oversight boards. These mechanisms are imperfect — we know that — but they exist. For federal immigration agents operating in American communities, many of these safeguards are absent or deliberately circumvented.
The Wall Street Journal has identified at least 13 instances of immigration officers firing at or into civilian vehicles since July 2025. Firing at moving vehicles is considered a last-resort tactic by most law enforcement agencies because it endangers bystanders, passengers, and everyone nearby. Yet it has become a recurring pattern in immigration enforcement operations.
When the government deploys armed agents into American neighborhoods and those agents kill people — including American citizens, including people who aren't even the target of the operation — and then provides accounts that witnesses and video contradict, and then withholds evidence from state prosecutors, and then faces no consequences — that is not law enforcement. That is something else entirely.
We Support Immigration Enforcement. We Do Not Support This.
Let us be clear about where we stand, because this issue has been so thoroughly polarized that nuance is treated as weakness.
We believe the United States has the right and the obligation to enforce its immigration laws. We believe in secure borders. We believe that people who are in the country without authorization and who have been issued final orders of removal should be removed through lawful processes. We believe that a functioning immigration system is essential to national sovereignty, economic stability, and public trust in government.
None of that is in conflict with what we are saying here.
What we are saying is that immigration enforcement must operate within the same constitutional framework that governs all government power in this country. The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. The Fifth Amendment guarantees due process. The Fourteenth Amendment promises equal protection under the law. These protections do not evaporate because the person being encountered is suspected of an immigration violation — and they certainly do not evaporate for the American citizens and lawfully present residents who keep getting caught in the crossfire.
Enforcement without accountability is not law and order. It is state violence with paperwork.
What Balanced Immigration Policy Actually Looks Like
The current political dynamic on immigration is broken in both directions. One side treats any enforcement as cruelty. The other side treats any restraint as weakness. Neither position serves the country.
Here is what a common-sense immigration policy looks like:
Secure borders with modern technology and adequate staffing. Border security is a legitimate national interest. Invest in surveillance technology, port-of-entry infrastructure, and Border Patrol staffing. Physical barriers where they make tactical sense. None of this is controversial to most Americans.
A functional legal immigration system. The current system is so backlogged, byzantine, and underfunded that people who are trying to come legally wait years or decades. Streamline legal pathways for workers, families, and asylum seekers. A country that makes legal immigration nearly impossible shouldn't be surprised when illegal immigration persists.
Enforcement with accountability. Yes, enforce the law. Yes, deport people who have no legal right to be here and who have exhausted their legal options. But do it with body cameras, independent oversight, transparent use-of-force policies, and consequences for agents who violate them. If a local police department operated the way ICE has been operating — shooting people who aren't even targets, withholding evidence from prosecutors, refusing to wear body cameras — there would be a federal investigation. The same standards should apply to federal agents.
A path for long-term residents who have built lives here. There are millions of people in this country who came without authorization years or decades ago, who have worked, paid taxes, raised American citizen children, and committed no crimes. Mass deportation of these people is neither practical nor humane. A path to legal status — not necessarily citizenship, but legal status — for people who meet clear criteria (no criminal record, tax compliance, continuous residence) is the pragmatic solution that most Americans support.
Address root causes. People don't leave their homes and risk their lives crossing borders because they want to. They do it because conditions in their home countries are desperate. Trade policy, foreign aid, and diplomatic engagement with sending countries are not alternatives to border security — they're complements to it. You can't solve immigration with enforcement alone any more than you can solve crime with prisons alone.
The Real Question
The question Americans should be asking is not whether we should enforce immigration laws. Of course we should. The question is whether we are willing to accept a standard of enforcement that has resulted in nine deaths in 39 shootings, including American citizens, including people who were not even the subjects of the operations, with almost no accountability, no body cameras, and federal agencies withholding evidence from state prosecutors.
Because if we are willing to accept that — if we decide that collateral damage is just the cost of enforcement — then we have made a choice about what kind of country we are. And it's not a choice that any honest conservative, any honest liberal, or any honest moderate should be comfortable with.
Joan Sebastian Guerrero was not here illegally. He had work authorization. He had a Social Security number. He was 26 years old. He is dead because an ICE agent discharged a weapon during a vehicle stop targeting someone else, without a body camera, without independent oversight, and — so far — without consequence.
That's not border security. That's a government that has lost control of its own enforcement apparatus.
We can secure our borders and enforce our laws without killing people who aren't even the subject of the operation. We can have immigration enforcement and accountability. We can be a nation of laws without becoming a nation where federal agents operate beyond the reach of those laws.
That shouldn't be a controversial position. It's common sense.