MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed a Colombian immigrant in Maine on Monday. This is the second time ICE agents shot and killed someone in a week, and at least the ninth time since President Trump launched his immigration crackdown. The Department of Homeland Security said agents were watching the address of an immigrant with a deportation order when someone drove away and an officer eventually shot him. In a few minutes, we'll ask independent Maine Senator Angus King what he's hearing from DHS officials and what questions he still has. But we will start with the details.
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Reporter Ari Snider with Maine Public has been following this. Ari, so what's known so far?
ARI SNIDER, BYLINE: Yeah. So the shooting took place Monday morning in Biddeford. That's a small city about half an hour south of Portland. The victim is a 26-year-old Colombian man. That's according to immigrant rights groups and Senator King. We don't have official confirmation on the victim's name, but community members are telling me it was a man named Joan Sebastian Guerrero. They're also telling me he had a wife and a young child. His immigration status isn't yet clear, but immigrant rights groups here say he did have authorization to work in the U.S.
MARTÍNEZ: Do we know if ICE was, in fact, targeting this particular person for arrest and deportation?
SNIDER: Yeah, so that part's not totally clear yet. A spokesperson for Senator King's office said the victim was, quote, "not the target of the warrant," end quote. The spokesperson says that information comes from the head of the agency, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin. In an email after that, an ICE spokesperson said the shooting happened after a driver left a house they were surveilling but did not definitively say if the driver was who they were looking for.
The spokesperson told us agents were surveilling the last-known address of - again, quoting here - "an illegal alien with a final order of removal." The ICE spokesperson says, quote, "the vehicle attempted to flee the scene, and fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon." So now Maine's attorney general says his office is investigating what happened. And Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins said in a statement that DHS' inspector general is also looking into this, investigating in cooperation with the FBI.
MARTÍNEZ: So what are you and your colleagues hearing as you've been talking to people in Biddeford?
SNIDER: Biddeford is a small city, a little over 20,000 people. And it's got deep immigrant roots, in part because it was a mill town that drew a lot of French Canadians. These days, it's got growing immigrant communities from all over the world, in part 'cause we're seeing people getting priced out of Portland. The reaction there was swift. And many residents said they were in shock that something like this would happen in, you know, what really feels like a small town. So to give you an example, you know, the shooting took place in the morning, and by noon, a couple hundred protesters were marching through downtown. Protester Kelsey Cummings says she's tired of politicians ignoring requests to rein in ICE.
KELSEY CUMMINGS: And we don't need the thoughts and prayers. This was so preventable. We've been screaming about this. This is just crazy. This - all of us are here because we live a block away in each direction. This is affecting all of us.
SNIDER: And then last night, there were vigils both in Biddeford and in Portland that each drew hundreds of people.
MARTÍNEZ: What has ICE enforcement looked like in Maine in recent months?
SNIDER: Something that's very present in people's minds right now, and certainly for immigrant communities, is this sudden surge in federal immigration enforcement that happened in January when 200 people were arrested in less than a week, according to numbers from the Deportation Data Project. That was a huge escalation from what we saw during the first months of the second Trump administration. But even with that dramatic increase in enforcement, we hadn't seen any shootings here, fatal or otherwise, until now.
MARTÍNEZ: OK. That's reporter Ari Snider of Maine Public. Ari, thank you very much.
SNIDER: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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