In the minutes after an immigration officer opened fire in a small coastal city in southern Maine, a now-familiar story began to unfold: another person had been shot and killed inside a moving vehicle during an immigration enforcement operation.
The Department of Homeland Security later said the officer fired his weapon when the man they were pursuing attempted to flee the scene, threatening “public safety.”
It’s a narrative that has been repeated again and again since the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown began, with federal officers confronting drivers then saying they opened fire when their vehicles became a danger. That’s despite decades of warnings from policing experts that shooting into moving cars presents a danger of its own and should almost always be avoided.
The Embassy of Colombia identified the man killed Monday in Biddeford, roughly 15 miles (24 kilometers) southwest of Portland, as Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian national. Some friends, neighbors and an advocacy group have spelled his name “Joan.”
Nine dead in immigration operations
He is the ninth killed during immigration operations since the start of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. At least four of those deaths involved people in vehicles, including one last week in Houston, a trend so troubling U.S. Sen. Susan Collins said Tuesday she urged DHS secretary Markwayne Mullin “to cease all non-urgent vehicle stops.”
A person familiar with the matter told AP Tuesday that administration officials told immigration officers to suspend most vehicle stops. Some policing experts say Immigration and Customs Enforcement should never have conducted traffic stops.
“They’re saying that all these cases are justified because the officers were in danger,” said John Sandweg, who was acting director at ICE, which is part of DHS, during the Obama administration. “But then why the hell are we putting the officer in danger by asking them to execute traffic stops?”
Sandweg, who estimates there have been roughly 18 traffic-stop shootings during the immigration crackdown, noted there are many other places to make arrests, from homes to workplaces.
The fatal vehicle shootings, though, keep happening.
There was Ruben Ray Martinez, a 23-year-old U.S. citizen, shot during a late-night traffic stop in South Texas in March 2025, and Renee Good, a mother of three shot and killed in January as she drove her car through the streets of a Minneapolis residential neighborhood amid growing anti-crackdown protests.
Last week, it was Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican builder shot and killed as he drove his crew to a worksite in Houston, where he had lived and worked for decades.
Shooting into moving vehicles creates danger for all who are near
Each time, officials insisted the federal officers had fired because they feared they or someone else could be killed by the vehicles.
“Many of you have been told this law enforcement officer wasn’t hit by a car, wasn’t being harassed, and murdered an innocent woman,” Vice President JD Vance wrote on X after Good was killed. “The reality is that his life was endangered and he fired in self defense.”
That shooting was captured on multiple bystander videos that contradicted the administration’s narrative and prompted widespread anger and protests against the officers’ use of deadly force.
Much remains unknown about the others.
Officers were not wearing body cameras in the Salgado Araujo or the Durán Guerrero killings, despite DHS announcing months ago that it would outfit all officers with cameras.
Geoffrey P. Alpert, an expert on policing at the University of South Carolina, said without video evidence, investigators must rely on witness statements.
“There’s certainly a pattern, a practice, a trend that is disturbing,” Alpert said, adding that police departments decades ago began prohibiting officers from shooting into moving cars because if the driver is injured or killed, they can lose control, turning the vehicle into “an unguided missile,” threatening anyone nearby. Yet immigration officers in the second Trump administration have repeatedly killed people this way.
“Every bullet needs to be understood: why was it fired. Every time an officer pulls the trigger, we need to know why,” Alpert said. “We talked about that last time, and we’ll talk about that the next time.”
Texas lawmaker notes conflicting descriptions of Houston shooting
Doubts are already swirling about the official story the administration told about the fatal shooting of 52-year-old Salgado Araujo in Houston.
DHS officials said in a statement that the Mexican national ignored commands and was trying to evade arrest, then attempted to ram his car into an officer, who opened fire in self-defense.
Rep. Sylvia Garcia said she visited the facility where the men who were in the vehicle with Salgado Araujo are being held and spoke to two of them, raising “many alarming questions” about the administration’s claims.
