More than a month before an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, the same agent was involved in a similar vehicle stop.

In both cases, David Brouillette and other ICE officers surveilled a house, looking for the owner of a car at that address. The car pulled out. The man driving was from Latin America, but was neither the owner of the car nor the target of the operation.

The agents made their move anyway.

In the earlier arrest, which happened in Androscoggin County, the man was taken into custody without violence. Immigration attorney Shaan Chatterjee’s firm represented the man and said Brouillette was not the one who handcuffed him.

“Brouillette had an ancillary role in the apprehension of my client,” Chatterjee said. “My client and I are grateful for that, in retrospect.” The man has been released on bond.

In Guerrero’s case, it’s still not clear what happened leading up to the shooting on July 13. The Department of Homeland Security has not confirmed Brouillette was the shooter, though his ex-wife identified him. No video has surfaced to show the interaction; the agents were reportedly wearing body cameras that couldn’t be turned on; and ICE has only said that its agents attempted to conduct a vehicle stop and the car attempted to flee, without providing evidence.

It’s one of many instances in Maine this year where ICE agents have stopped people in cars, sometimes without knowing who is in the driver’s seat. They have approached the cars and sometimes used violence or threats to get people out, which experts say is contrary to best practices for policing. 

The Trump administration’s push for thousands of deportations a day across the country has transformed the way ICE works. For months, advocates and community members in Maine have noted ICE sometimes using aggressive tactics, culminating in Guerrero’s killing. It put these tactics under such an intense microscope that shortly after the shooting, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin tried to pause vehicle stops but was overruled by President Donald Trump.

Chatterjee said the account his client gives of his arrest differs from ICE’s account. ICE said, in a document reviewed by the Portland Press Herald, that agents checked the driver’s identity before they took him into custody. Chatterjee’s client said they told him to get out of the car and restrained him and then checked his paperwork.

Like Guerrero, he is a father without a criminal record.

Border czar Tom Homan speaks with reporters at the White House in September 2025. Homan told CNN on Sunday that a new policy mandates that at least one body camera will record all traffic stops. It wasn’t clear when the rule would take effect. (Alex Brandon/Associated Press)

Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, said on CNN on Sunday that a new policy mandates that for all vehicle stops, at least one body camera will record the event. It’s unclear how that will happen in Maine, given that ICE said it would take 60 days to deploy cameras to the half of field offices nationwide that don’t have them. Homan also said “journeymen” agents will be assigned to vehicle stops.

In another arrest this year, on Feb. 27, which does not appear to have involved Brouillette, Karl Goma was outside the four-unit building where he lived in Biddeford, just around the corner from where Guerrero was shot. ICE agents pulled up beside his car and told him to get out. 

Goma had been working and paying rent, said the property manager, Ashanti Blok. His upstairs neighbor, Sierra, who asked to be referred to by her first name to protect her privacy, used her phone to film the first part of the interaction with ICE.

The video, which the Press Herald reviewed, showed three agents in vests at the car window. In a calm voice, one agent said “I’m going to have to break the window, and I’m going to have to pull you out.” Then he asked Goma again to step out of the car.

Video recorded Feb. 27 in Biddeford shows immigration agents detaining Karl Goma outside his residence.

Sierra stopped filming in order to call Biddeford Police. She said she heard Goma’s daughters screaming “Don’t take my dad,” and she saw the agents smash the car window and drag Goma out of the car. 

“He was wiggling around, not giving them the easiest of time, but he wasn’t resisting,” she said in an interview. Blok said it was “unnecessary” to smash the window, and “traumatic” for Goma’s wife and daughters to watch. While Goma was in custody, he and his family decided to leave the U.S., Blok said.

Chatterjee said he had never seen ICE agents smash car windows before Trump returned to office. His law firm is based in Massachusetts and regularly has clients who are detained in Maine and held in a detention facility in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Based on his firm’s cases, he believes ICE has used more aggressive tactics particularly since the January surge operation in Maine.

“It used to be more isolated incidents, but now I’d say it’s a pattern,” he said.

It’s not a universal experience, though. Attorneys at Haven Immigration Law in Portland, which also regularly represents people detained by ICE in Maine, said their clients have been taken into custody without conflict, though the firm has shown in court that many of its clients shouldn’t have been detained.

Chatterjee said the immigrants he represents who have reported getting threatened by ICE have no criminal history.

“They weren’t trying to avoid detection by immigration and most of them had work permits,” he said.

ICE and Trump have said vehicle stops are a necessary tool in the administration’s deportation efforts, but there are other ways to make these kinds of arrests, experts said.

Marc Brown, academic director and lead instructor at the Excellence in Policing and Public Safety Program at the University of South Carolina, called the tactic ICE is using a “vehicle takedown,” and contrasted it with a traffic stop. He said if other law enforcement agencies take down people in cars, they do a lot of coordination and planning. 

It’s better practice to wait until a subject gets out of the car to try to engage them, he said. Avoiding a pursuit in a car is safer for the agents, the subject and bystanders, he added.

“Smashing the window, to me, creates more danger, because now you’re dealing with broken glass and potential for your suspect and the officer to be cut,” Brown said. Afterward, you still have to open the door, he said, so it doesn’t really give officers an advantage. He said even if police officers were pursuing a violent criminal, they would try to get the person out of the car a different way.

Immigrants targeted by ICE in Maine this year have often been accused of civil offenses, not crimes, and judges have ordered dozens of them released on bond.

Alexis Howard, left, of Saco, and Cricket Rae, of Saco, light candles and leave notes during a vigil at Mechanics Park in Biddeford on July 13, the day Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was shot and killed by an ICE agent. (Daryn Slover/Staff Photographer)

Brown, who is also a former police officer and worked for the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers where ICE agents get trained, said in his law enforcement career, even when there was an arrest warrant for someone, a first step might be to call them and ask them to turn themselves in. Overall, he said ICE could operate with more precision.

Deborah Ramirez, a former federal prosecutor who worked with the Drug Enforcement Administration and Federal Bureau of Investigation, agreed. 

“They have to have probable cause to stop someone, and use only the amount of force that’s necessary,” said Ramirez, now a law professor at Northeastern University in Boston.

“Everyday the FBI arrests people,” she said. “Do they arrest people like this? No.”

Talking about instances where ICE has smashed windows, pulled people out of cars and detained people who were not the targets, she said, “That’s not the way you stop a car, especially if you’re in an unmarked car. Tactics matter.”

She said federal agents are trained not to shoot at a moving car. Officers should identify themselves, explain why they’re pulling someone over, and look at their identification, she said.

“The way they’re policing is dangerous to the community,” Ramirez said. She’s leading an effort to help cities and states hold ICE agents accountable in those incidents.

Brown said when he was an officer, ICE detained people who were already in jails, but were not in the streets. 

“I don’t think they were designed to do this, so it’s not too surprising that they’re having some of the challenges that they’re having,” he said.

Ramirez, Brown and other experts say judicial warrants signed by a judge would be more effective, though they would add an administrative burden for the Trump administration and could slow the mass deportation effort.

Brown believes ICE’s public safety mission is being lost.

“If you’re not trying to ensure public safety,” he said, “then what are you doing?”