Ben Tansel is a writer and an executive chef who has spent nearly 20 years leading restaurant kitchens alongside immigrants from around the world. He lives in Biddeford.

I was walking my elderly golden retriever last Monday morning when, four blocks from me, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero.

My dog, Tuckerman, will turn 11 later this month. He takes his time. We go the same way every morning, down Fall Street in Biddeford, left on Pool, past the same chain-link fences and the same porch where the same cat watches us with the same contempt. I did not know Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. But I knew the intersection where he died the way you know the back of your own hand. Hill and Pool. Four blocks. I have probably walked past that corner a million times. 

The next morning was my 41st birthday. Jenny and I had planned to have lunch at Erin French’s The Little Lost Kitchen, up in Freedom, two hours north. We got in the car, and for the two-hour drive, through lunch, and the two hours back south, we talked about almost nothing except what had happened four blocks from our apartment the day before. 

When we got home that evening, we did what we do every evening. We leashed up Tuckerman and walked. Except this time, instead of passing the empty intersection we usually pass, we walked toward a memorial.

The sun, red from wildfire smoke, was going down behind the mill buildings. There were candles, most of them lit, flowers in their grocery store cellophane, a portrait of Johan, young, smiling. And draped on the hedge, a Bluey blanket. I started crying before Jenny did. 

I’ve been a cook for almost 20 years now. I currently run a kitchen in Ogunquit, 40 minutes down the coast, where our crew includes H-2B and J-1 visa holders alongside cooks who grew up down the block. 

Immigration has never been an abstraction for me, because kitchens don’t allow abstraction. You can debate immigration policy in the op-ed pages, but you cannot debate with the person beside you who is breaking down fish, covering your station and staying late to make sure everything is set for the next day. You learn whose mother is sick, whose child just started school, who is sending most of a paycheck home. You learn who can make the whole kitchen burst into laughter after a really difficult service. Something happens between people who survive this together. That doesn’t happen in many settings. 

What all of that adds up to, over 20 years, is a belief I didn’t arrive at through any political argument: People are not valuable because they are useful to you. I believe that about the cook who’s been with me for years and I believe it about the 18-year-old dishwasher who started last month and can barely make eye contact. Their worth isn’t a function of how well the kitchen runs because they showed up. It isn’t tied to that at all.

Maine calls itself Vacationland. It’s on the license plate. Every summer, a couple million people come up here for the lobster rolls, lighthouses and a version of the coast that looks good in an Instagram photo carousel. 

What most of them never see, and never think to ask about, is who gets that coast ready for them. The prep cooks who are in by 5 a.m., boiling lobsters by the dozens before the first ferry runs to the tiny islands. The housekeepers turning over 40 rooms for the next set of beachgoers. The cleaners vacuuming up sand at midnight so the hotel lobby can look untouched by 7 a.m.

This state’s tourism economy does not function without international labor, and I don’t say that because it’s a clever point to make in an essay. I say it because I’ve stood in the kitchen for the last two decades and seen it. 

But I don’t want to make this only an economic argument, because the economic argument is the transactional one, and the transactional argument is exactly what got us here. They are essential, we say about immigrant workers, and we mean it as praise, and it is true, but it can quietly become a test. Essential to whom? Essential for what? A person’s right to come home safely to his family should not depend on whether he was useful to a restaurant or a hotel or a wealthy tourist town that week.

I contacted Sen. Angus King’s office, because I wanted to hear how someone with actual power over any of this was thinking about it. 

“So we start with the premise that we ought to have video, and then we’d know what happened. Secondly, there should be a thorough, open, unvarnished investigation. But, importantly, it should involve state and local officials, not just ICE, DHS and the FBI,” King said.

“To be honest, those institutions just don’t have much credibility right now. And an investigation into this that doesn’t have some independent verification is certainly not going to satisfy my people in Maine that the fairness and justice has been carried out.”

I don’t need a senator to tell me that. Twenty years in kitchens told me first. But it matters that he’s saying it, because accountability is supposed to apply through people who require it, and right now a lot of people in this state are waiting to see if it will.

One of the H-2B cooks on my crew agreed to talk to me if I didn’t use her name. I asked her the only question I really had, which was whether anything felt different now, day to day, walking to the store, riding her bike to work.

“I’m not looking over my shoulder all the time,” she said. “But I do feel like I need to look for familiar faces when I’m doing things around town.” I didn’t ask a follow-up question. 

While I’ve been writing this, a man in Florida was killed in another encounter with immigration agents, a week after a similar death in Texas. I can’t do justice to any of those deaths by listing them in a paragraph. I bring it up because Johan’s death isn’t an isolated dispute over parking and rent. It’s part of something larger happening in more than one place right now.

Within a day, Johan’s name was showing up in coverage of one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country, and the candidates had already started using it to make their case to voters.

Johan is not a campaign issue; he’s a father who isn’t coming home.

By Tuesday, ICE had quietly told its own agents to pause traffic stops while it reviewed what happened. By Wednesday morning, President Donald Trump was on Truth Social calling those same stops one of the agency’s most effective tools and writing that the agents carrying them out were “doing a GREAT job, one that has to be done.” I don’t know how you hold both of those things happening less than 24 hours apart. The president’s criticism led ICE to lift the traffic stop pause later that day.

I do not need a politician to tell me immigrant workers matter. The kitchens where I have spent my adult life taught me that years ago. Working in restaurants taught me something else I did not fully understand until much later. Every person who walks through a dining room is carrying a story you cannot see.

Someone is celebrating, just received a diagnosis, grieving. Parents are finally getting a break from their children and reconnecting.

The job is not simply feeding people. It is recognizing that we are all more fragile than we appear. Maybe that is why Johan’s death has unsettled me so deeply. Violence does not simply take a victim, it redistributes grief.

It hands pieces of itself to witnesses, neighbors, first responders, friends and children. It changes the emotional climate of a place. Long after the television cameras leave and Biddeford returns to chattering about parking, restaurants, rent and what Biddeford is becoming, there will still be a little girl carrying a memory she never chose. 

The morning Johan died, I was doing something completely ordinary. I was walking an old dog who takes his time. Somewhere four blocks away, a wife and daughter were losing someone they loved. Four blocks is not very far. I know we’ll make that walk again. I just don’t think I’ll ever make it without thinking about her dad.