Nearly a week after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent David Brouillette shot and killed Johan (Joan) Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, new details have emerged about the shooter’s history of violence, even as President Donald Trump has restored the very traffic-stop practices that led to Guerrero’s death.

Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian immigrant working legally in the United States with an active asylum case, was shot multiple times through the windshield of his car shortly after 7 a.m. on July 13 at the intersection of Pool and Hill Streets, a block from his home. ICE agents were conducting surveillance related to a warrant for someone else entirely. Durán Guerrero was not the target of the operation. As he tried to drive away, an agent opened fire, killing him in front of neighbors who ran outside to find his wife and young daughter screaming over his body. None of the agents on the scene wore body cameras.

Durán Guerrero’s death came less than a week after ICE agents killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston under nearly identical circumstances, gunning him down as he drove to a construction job with coworkers. Neither man was the target of the operation that killed him.

The back-to-back killings briefly forced Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to order ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division to suspend most vehicle stops while agents received additional training. The pause lasted barely a day.

Trump, who was reportedly not informed of the pause before it was announced, became furious after conservative media personalities cast the decision as a retreat. Steve Bannon used his “War Room” program to denounce Mullin, with guest Mike Davis declaring on air, “You work for President Trump, you don’t work for Senate Democrats, you don’t work for Susan Collins.” Fox personality Tomi Lahren and disgraced former Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino piled on as well.

By Wednesday morning, Trump had posted on Truth Social that ICE’s traffic stops were among agents’ “most important and effective Crime Fighting tools” and ordered them resumed. He declared, “The Radical Left Dumocrats would like to see this done, but it won’t happen on my watch.”

Mullin, who days earlier had ordered the pause, promptly reversed himself, insisting he and Trump were “on the same page.” The about-face came as ICE faced internal pressure to meet Trump’s target of 2,000 arrests a day.

Durán Guerrero’s wife, Karolina Rojas Alvarez, spoke publicly for the first time Thursday at a news conference at the Lincoln Hotel in Biddeford, flanked by her husband’s sister Daniela and Keyko Torres of the immigrant rights group Presente! Maine. Speaking through a translator, with attorney Ben Gideon at her side, she described a devoted partner and father.

“My soul is broken. He was everything to me. He never let me worry about anything,” she said. “He always made me feel like a queen. I never wanted for anything. He gave me more than I ever dreamed of.”

She recalled how her husband doted on their three-year-old daughter from the day she was born, saying, “From the moment he held her in his arms and held her tiny hand, he never let her go.” Now, she said, she cannot bring herself to explain his absence to their daughter. “Now my daughter asks for Papá, and I don’t have the strength to tell her that Papá isn’t coming, that she can’t hug him anymore or tell him, ‘Papi, I love you.’”

All that remains, she said, are photographs and a blanket printed with the three of them together that he had given his daughter weeks before he was killed.

ICE has refused to officially confirm the identity of the agent who killed Durán Guerrero, with a spokesperson describing press efforts to name him as “doxxing.” But the shooter has been identified through multiple independent channels as David Michael Brouillette, 37, of Manchester, Maine. His own ex-wife corroborated reports that he was the killer, saying that he called her to admit he had fired the shots and to ask her to “lie for him” and “cover for his character.”

Brouillette was hired by ICE earlier this year. A Gardiner, Maine native, he served in the Maine National Guard from 2007 to 2010 before enlisting in the US Army, where he served from 2010 to 2015 as a human intelligence collector and deployed to Afghanistan from May 2012 to February 2013, leaving the service as a sergeant. He went on to work as a Maine prison guard, a police officer for the Togus VA (Veterans Affairs) Police Department, a volunteer firefighter and a real estate agent.

Two ex-wives have accused him of a history of violence toward former partners and his own children. One sought a protection order and sole custody of their child this week, though a judge declined to grant it.

His first ex-wife, Ashley Brouillette, told the Associated Press he has a long history of psychiatric issues and became physically abusive after the birth of their daughter. Court records further show that Brouillette once sued a Maine college over a 2021 workplace injury, when a steel beam struck his head, alleging the resulting concussion left him with lasting “cognitive deficits” that impaired his memory and daily functioning.

Demonstrations have continued daily across Maine since the killing, including at an ICE facility in Scarborough, in Portland and in Lewiston. On Friday, hundreds gathered again at Mechanics Park in Biddeford, steps from a memorial fence that has grown daily with flowers, notes and photographs.

Among those at Friday’s protest was Olaf, a Biddeford resident who lives blocks from the shooting site and who took the day off work the day of the shooting. “It really hurts, you know, locally, on a community level,” he said.

“I think it’s going to reach a boiling point, especially with everybody at odds with each other,” he added. “Everyone’s only getting angrier and more upset and innocent people are dying and being hurt and communities are just being torn apart and it’s horrible.

“I think we really need to think of everything as all connected—whether it be the war on Iran and tensions in the Middle East, the Israelis, the Palestinian genocide, everything. I think maybe 20 years from now we’ll look back and be like, wow, we were living through the earlier stages of World War III and had no idea.”

He added that he did not believe that the Democratic Party, even if it retook Congress in November, offered a way out. “I think at the end of the day it’s up to the people,” he said.

Sen. Ed Markey (Democrat, Massachusetts) attended the Biddeford rally Friday, telling reporters he had come because “Massachusetts mourns with” the community. He called ICE a “renegade, terrorist army” and criticized the agency’s continued refusal to equip agents in Maine with body cameras despite the billions of dollars funneled to the agency by the Trump administration and congressional Republicans.

Markey’s remarks point to the impotence of the Democratic Party’s response and its complicity in the ICE murders. While senators and House members have called for investigations, body cameras and hearings, none has moved to dismantle ICE, an agency that both parties have built up over decades and that has received tens of billions of dollars under the Trump administration’s tax and spending legislation. Markey himself, for all his condemnation of ICE as a “terrorist army,” has introduced no legislation to strip the agency of funding, instead calling only for agents’ conduct to be reined in through oversight and training.

This pattern has been repeated nationally. Texas Democrats responding to Salgado Araujo’s killing likewise called for investigations and congressional hearings rather than any serious challenge to the deportation machinery both parties have built. As the World Socialist Web Site wrote of that killing, Salgado Araujo was only the latest victim in “a series of state murders against workers of all races and nationalities,” carried out alongside the mass prosecution of those who resist, including 15 Prairieland defendants sentenced to a combined 556 years in prison and 15 Minneapolis residents facing federal conspiracy charges for opposing ICE’s occupation of their city.

The WSWS has called for the mobilization of the working class through independent rank-and-file workplace and neighborhood committees to fight ICE terror, demanding that Guerrero’s and Salgado Araujo’s killers be identified, arrested and prosecuted, that ICE and Customs and Border Protection be dismantled, that National Guard and federal paramilitary forces be withdrawn from American cities and that all detained immigrants and all those imprisoned for opposing ICE be released. Behind Trump’s reversal of even a token pause on traffic stops, and the Democrats’ refusal to move beyond calls for hearings, lies the reality that both parties are committed to the deportation apparatus itself.