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Joe Barbieri, of Cape Elizabeth, and his daughter, Gianna Barbieri, gather their thoughts at a memorial for Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero at the corner of Hill and Pool streets in Biddeford on Tuesday. (Daryn Slover/Staff Photographer)

More than 24 hours after an immigration agent shot and killed a man in a Biddeford neighborhood on Monday, many gaps still remained in understanding exactly what happened. Immigration officials have released few key details of the shooting.

Security camera footage from a pawn shop obtained by the Portland Press Herald shows the intersection near where the shooting happened in the moments before and after, but not the encounter itself.

The identity of the man who was killed, Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, has been confirmed by the Colombian Embassy in the U.S. Guerrero was 26 and a citizen of Colombia and lived on the same block where the shooting happened. 

A local friend of his named Yasmin, who didn’t want to share her last name publicly out of fear for her safety, said in an interview in Spanish that she has known him about a year and that he has been in the U.S. for three years.

ABC News reported Tuesday evening that Guerrero entered the U.S. illegally through the southern border on Sept. 1, 2023, according to the Department of Homeland Security, and that he was granted legal work authorization in May 2025.

Yasmin said Guerrero had made an asylum claim, though the Portland Press Herald was not able to verify it Tuesday. A pending asylum claim could make him eligible for work authorization and allow him to remain in the U.S. while the claim was evaluated. Yasmin added that Guerrero first lived in New Jersey before he moved to Maine.

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Guerrero’s father told Spanish-language news outlets that he had come to the country in search of a better life. He confirmed what other sources told the Press Herald, that Guerrero worked two jobs in Maine to support his partner and young daughter, as a delivery driver and at a veterinary clinic.

The agent who shot Guerrero has not been identified, though ABC News and The Atlantic reported the agent was hired by ICE earlier this year, and that previously, starting in 2017, he was a law enforcement officer for the Department of Veterans Affairs.

It could take much longer to know more about him. In a similar deadly shooting in Houston last week, local authorities said Monday they were still trying to find out the identity of the shooter. The Office of the Maine Attorney General said the agent in Biddeford would be put on leave, as is typical in situations where law enforcement officers shoot people.

The shooting happened at about 7:15 a.m. on Monday. Yasmin said that Guerrero had just left his apartment and was going to work.

Four bullet holes were visible in the windshield of the white Kia sedan Guerrero was driving. As a local resident, Daniel Boucher, was getting ready for the day he heard the gunshots and rushed to the window to see Guerrero profusely bleeding from the head. Agents were pulling Guerrero from the car, having pinned the car between a law enforcement truck and the curb.

Guerrero’s partner and young daughter stood nearby in the aftermath, crying.

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Video footage does not show how ICE approached Guerrero, or how he initially reacted. ICE said in a statement that it attempted to stop the car.

Trump administration officials first told Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, that Guerrero had “weaponized” the car he was driving, but later in the day the Department of Homeland Security put out its official statement to the public and said only that the driver “attempted to flee the scene” when agents tried to stop it, and that “fearing for public safety an officer discharged his weapon.”

“That’s a rather vague statement,” King said on Maine Public on Tuesday. “He didn’t say he was concerned for his own safety or his own life.”

On Tuesday, following the Maine and Houston shootings, the Trump administration ordered ICE to halt most vehicle stops nationwide, according to reporting by CNN and The New York Times. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said she’d urged Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to take that action Monday night given the “sufficient critical questions” raised by the shooting.

“It is extremely unfortunate that the agent involved did not have a body-worn camera,” Collins said on Facebook Tuesday.

ICE confirmed Guerrero’s identity in an email to the Press Herald late on Tuesday. At first the administration provided incorrect information about whether he was the person that immigration agents were targeting on Monday. Hours after the shooting, King said that Mullin told him Guerrero was not, in fact, under surveillance, and that ICE was looking for another man.

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ICE has not said who it was surveilling. The agency’s news release said “an illegal alien departed the residence in a vehicle,” but it does not say whether it’s referring to Guerrero. Immigrant rights groups in Maine said he had a valid Social Security number.

None of the security camera footage made available by neighbors or businesses shows how ICE approached the sedan. There was no security camera on the building where Guerrero lived, the property manager confirmed to the Press Herald.

The Office of the Maine Attorney General is leading the local investigation, according to Biddeford police, though an attorney general’s spokesperson did not respond on Tuesday to requests to talk about the scope of the investigation. Maine State Police’s Evidence Response Team was on-site in Biddeford on Monday. 

Federally, the FBI and Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General are also investigating. Under Mullin, DHS has not put out the kinds of inflammatory statements that previous secretary Kristi Noem was known for after the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota, when she called Pretti, a veterans health nurse, a “domestic terrorist.”

However, state Sen. Henry Ingwersen, a Democrat who represents Biddeford, said that for an investigation to be fair, transparent and believable, it would have to involve more than just federal authorities.

King agreed.

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“Unfortunately, an investigation that’s conducted right now by DHS or FBI just isn’t going to have any credibility with the people of Maine,” he said.

King, Collins, and Maine Reps. Chellie Pingree and Jared Golden, both Democrats, wrote to the inspector general for DHS on Tuesday asking for a detailed timeline of the encounter, an evaluation of the tactics used by ICE, and clarification about what video and audio documentation the department has access to. It does not call for the public release of those materials.

The letter also asked that the inspector general “detail the extent to which DHS will collaborate with state or local agencies in carrying out the investigation.”

The Maine Department of the Secretary of State told the Press Herald Tuesday that it has continued to reject ICE’s applications for confidential license plates in recent weeks, a practice it started in January around an ICE enforcement surge in the state. The Trump administration has sued Maine over the practice, which Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said will make it harder for ICE to be undercover in the state.

Protesters on Main Street in Biddeford on Monday, after a man was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent. (Derek Davis/Staff Photographer)

Anti-ICE demonstrations erupted in the hours after the shooting and continued throughout the day on Tuesday in Maine. 

About 100 protesters gathered at an ICE facility in Scarborough and sang alongside religious leaders. They said the singing was “medicine for the people here,” and they demanded ICE to leave Maine. 

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A counter-protester armed with a gun and knife brought a megaphone to the demonstration, where safety marshals wearing orange vests tried to escort him away. His presence echoed some comments online and on the streets of Biddeford on Monday, when a few people heard by the Press Herald expressed support for ICE and increased immigration enforcement.

The most visible and forceful voices have gathered against ICE’s actions, though. In Waterville over 80 protesters held signs featuring the names of people who died in ICE custody or at the hands of ICE agents under the Trump administration.

“This is exactly what we’ve been saying is going to happen here, and now it’s happened,” organizer Elizabeth Leonard said.

Editor’s note: This story was updated on July 14 to add that Guerrero reportedly entered the country illegally in 2023 and that the ICE agent who shot him was hired this year.

Staff Writers Morgan Womack, Rachel Ohm, Isabelle Oss, Dylan Tusinski, Reuben Schafir, Abigail Pritchard and Dana Richie contributed to this story.

Rachel Estabrook is an accountability reporter at the Portland Press Herald. Before joining the Press Herald in 2026, Rachel worked in the newsroom at Colorado Public Radio for 12 years. She's originally...

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