Who Is ICE Really Hiring?
The fatal shooting of Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero has exposed how reckless hiring shortcuts and broken background checks are putting lethal power in the wrong hands.
Frank Figliuzzi hosts The Frank Figliuzzi Show on Lincoln Square. He is an FBI Assistant Director (retired); 25-year veteran Special Agent; and author of the national bestseller, The FBI Way, and Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers. Subscribe to his Substack.
Now we have another question to ask when an ICE agent shoots someone in the streets, which has happened at least 23 times since last year. We already question whether the shooting was a valid use of deadly force. We also routinely ponder if the agents had a legitimate reason to even approach the individual. And now we must ask whether the ICE agent involved should have ever been hired.
The fatal shooting in Biddeford, Maine, last Monday morning of Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian national and father of a 3-year-old girl, has us demanding answers not only about what these agents do, but about who these agents really are.
When the rookie ICE agent who killed Guerrero told his ex-wife late last year that he was joining the agency, she thought he was having another mental health episode. She told reporters that her ex-husband was plagued by a history of psychiatric concerns that caused her to think that his claim about becoming a federal agent couldn’t be real. Only when videos of the shooting appeared on social media did she realize her ex wasn’t kidding. They were high school sweethearts, married in 2007 but divorced two years later when he was physically violent toward her while she was pregnant. Later, she claims, he threw boiling water at her while she was holding their child. Even after they broke up he was still abusive.
A second ex-wife recounted her own allegations of years of abuse against her and their daughters in hundreds of family court files obtained by the Associated Press. There were requests for temporary protection orders after the now ICE agent tackled his teenage daughter, smashed food in her hair, and in a separate incident dragged her around the house as she sobbed. In 2021, a judge granted a protection order on behalf of a teenage daughter. The agent’s oldest daughter said she came home from school one day and her dad told her he had been sitting on a tree stump with a gun to his head.