Maine ICE Officer Who Killed a Man Had a Past Full of Red Flags

David Brouillette’s fatal shooting of a Colombian migrant raises more questions about a rapidly expanding agency’s vetting process.

David Brouillette is the rookie Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer who shot and killed Colombian migrant Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero during a traffic stop in July. Newly released messages show that the officer had it out for immigrants, particularly Colombians. This comes on the heels of reports that Brouillette had a sporadic job record and a history of domestic abuse allegations and mental illness. All of this raises the question: Just how much is ICE vetting its hires?

ICE agents tried to stop Durán Guerrero's car when they were staking out his Maine apartment in search of someone else. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claimed after the shooting that Durán Guerrero "attempted to flee the scene" in his vehicle and that Brouillette then fired out of fear for public safety. Lawyers for Durán Guerrero's family have said that he had a valid work authorization to be in the U.S. and had no criminal record. There is no bodycam footage, and the incident is still under investigation.

Now The New York Times has obtained a series of angry emails that Brouillette wrote to his sister about her longtime boyfriend and father of her children, a man of Colombian descent. Among other things, Brouillette said that her partner "can take his non citizen ass back to his country and enjoy his third world luxuries," that his "bloodline knows nothing about what it takes to earn and then CHERISH the freedom America offers," and that "Your choices have cost you a brother. I am so so so ashamed of you. You're dead to me Liz. Enjoy it. Dead to me. DEAD."

Those messages—a snapshot, his sister said, of his anger toward people born outside the United States—are not the only eyebrow-raising element of Brouillette's history to emerge since the shooting. According to the Associated Press, a family member claims he was diagnosed with severe bipolar and attention deficit disorder when he was a child. His sister, a licensed therapist, says his condition worsened since he returned from service in Afghanistan in 2013 and that he has been struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Brouillette's mother told the Times that her son "is dangerous and should not have weapons." (She also said: "Believe his victims, not him.") His two former wives have both claimed that he had physically abused them, which he has disputed. His daughter told the Associated Press that he said to her after school one day that he had been sitting on a tree stump with a gun to his head.

Brouillette bounced between at least half a dozen jobs from 2015 to 2025. He had a short stint as a volunteer firefighter in late 2021; the then–fire chief has called him "a loose cannon," saying, "It didn't take me long to recognize that I'd made a mistake."

He suffered a traumatic brain injury during a firefighter training exercise at Southern Maine Community College. He sued the school two years later in 2023, claiming that the injury caused lasting symptoms including "impaired memory, cognitive deficits, headaches, vertigo and light sensitivity."

"He was a walking red flag," says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. "He should not have been allowed within a mile of a law enforcement job…and yet ICE not only brought him on board, but they fast-tracked him into the field."

Brouillette was hired in December amid the Trump administration's effort to bolster ICE's numbers. According to the Times, the agency allowed him to skip parts of the full training program as part of its more relaxed protocols for former law enforcement officers. On the day of the shooting, his background check was still incomplete.

When CNN asked border czar Tom Homan about Brouillette, Homan called him a "rare instance." But David J. Bier, director of Immigration Studies at the Cato Institute, argues that even if that's true, just a few "rare instances" can have an enormous impact. "One is too many," Bier tells Reason. "When you say it's just a few people, well, those few people are interacting with thousands of people every year. So it really doesn't take many mistakes in the hiring process to have really big implications for the perception of ICE and the impact on the public."

"The worrying thing is we don't know how many other people out there are like him," Reichlin-Melnick tells Reason. Some reports suggest that ICE has been quietly sacking recruits, uncovering problems in their backgrounds after the fact. A former federal official from the agency told the Times that hundreds hired during the surge had already been removed; a recent Washington Post report uncovered 19 officers with past allegations of misconduct, criminal charges, or other employment red flags.

A 17-year ICE employee who oversaw the vetting process filed a formal whistleblower's complaint with the DHS Office of Inspector General in August 2025. The complaint says that "systemic breakdowns in vetting" have led to people getting job offers before even basic preliminary vetting, such as identity verification and credit checks. It also states that the DHS engaged in "deliberate circumvention of personnel vetting and clearance procedures in violation of governing law and policy," and it calls for an immediate halt of job offers until proper standards had been restored.

The DHS didn't heed his warning. Brouillette was brought on three months later. Seven months after that, Durán Guerrero was dead.