07/19/2026
Susan Collins owns this. Every last disgusting bit of it.
Few women will be surprised to learn that the ICE agent who shot and killed an innocent father on his way to work this week had a long history of violence against women. His ex-wives had spent years telling authorities about it -- in police reports, in family court, to his commanders in the military. ICE gave him a badge and a gun anyway.
Here is what his ex-wives have described of David Brouillette's violent behavior, in court filings and in interviews with reporters:
- Threw boiling water at his ex-wife while she held their baby
- Choked her, slammed her to the floor, pushed her against a wall
- Pointed a gun at her in the bathroom and said he would blow her brains "all over the bathtub"
- Broke down his second ex-wife's door, destroyed her belongings, threw her clothes off a bridge
- Spit in her face and cornered her in a room
- Sat in the parking lot of her workplace and turned up at her home -- "I am scared of him," she wrote in a request for a protective order
- Threw his 13-year-old daughter through a glass coffee table, bringing police and child protective services to his door
- Threatened to kill his ex-wife because she took their daughter's phone away
- Left her a voicemail calling her "disgusting" and saying that she and the women and girls in her "bloodline" should have their throats cut
- Lost his guns by order of a judge after his ex-wife described his aggression toward their 13-year-old daughter
Ashley Brouillette had known him since they were preteens. She married him in 2007 and left him two years later, and she says the violence started after he joined the military and never really stopped. She called the police on him more than once, and more than once she took it back -- a cycle all too common in domestic violence cases.
"Even though he did all these horrible things to me, in a way, he was still like my security blanket because he's all I ever known," she told NPR. "And so I would recant my story and say he didn't do anything. And so then the police wouldn't arrest him for it." She was afraid of him too. "David always intimidated me," she confided. "It's part of the reason why I stayed silent all these years about things that I've gone through."
His second ex-wife did not stay silent. Over years of filings in Maine's family courts, she asked judges again and again to protect her and her daughters from him -- describing a man who broke down her door, destroyed her belongings, and sat outside her workplace waiting for her to come out.
"I am scared of him coming to my home or sitting in the parking lot of my work until I leave," she wrote in one request for a protective order. In a 2021 filing she described him growing more aggressive with their 13-year-old daughter, and a judge stripped him of his fi****ms.
During the divorce, Ashley called his platoon leader in the Maine Army National Guard and offered to fax over paperwork documenting his psychiatric diagnoses. She says she was waved off as a "petty ex-wife."
What she was trying to tell them was not a secret either. Brouillette was diagnosed with severe bipolar disorder and ADHD as a child, relatives told the Associated Press, attempted su***de twice at the age of twelve, and was hospitalized more than once. Military recruiters initially turned him down because of the diagnoses; a relative says he was advised to go a year without his medication and apply again, which he did. Relatives say he came home from Afghanistan with PTSD, and that he "never should have been given a badge and gun."
In 2012 she left the state to get away from him. For years she has been telling people that if she is ever found dead, he is the one who did it.
Late last year, he left her a voicemail three minutes long, mocking her for having taken out a restraining order against him. She kept it, and later gave it to reporters. In it he slurs his words, calls her "disgusting" over and over, and says the women and girls in her "bloodline" should have their throats cut.
So when he called her around the same time to say ICE had hired him, she did not believe a word of it. "I honestly thought that he was being delusional," she said.
He was telling the truth. Either ICE never looked at David Brouillette's record -- or looked at it and didn't care about his long history of violence. They gave him a badge, a gun, and the authority to stop cars on American streets. Four years earlier, a judge had taken his guns away.
On Monday morning Brouillette fired four or five rounds into a car at the corner of Pool and Hill in Biddeford, Maine. The man inside was leaving his apartment building for work.
Mia Covino heard four or five shots and dropped to the floor of her home, then went to the window. Outside, a white car was spinning slowly through the intersection, and one of the agents -- believed to be the one who had just fired -- was hanging onto a door handle, yelling. The other agent, Covino recounted, was telling him "to stop, to relax, to calm down."
The man in the car was Johan Sebastián Guerrero, 25 years old, a delivery driver from Colombia who was leaving for work. He had a Social Security number and legal authorization to work, and he had been appearing at his immigration court dates. He was not the man ICE was looking for. He was the sole provider for his wife and their three-year-old daughter.
DHS said its officer fired "fearing for public safety" as the vehicle "attempted to flee the scene." The department's own use-of-force policy permits deadly force only against a person posing an imminent threat of death or serious injury, and warns explicitly against using it to stop someone who is fleeing. Fleeing is what DHS says Guerrero did -- though they have still failed to produce any evidence supporting this claim.
Federal law enforcement officials, current and former, told CNN they were stunned by ICE's justification for killing someone in the street. "Every law enforcement officer in America is scratching their head trying to figure out what that means," one said. Another was blunter: "When you want to arrest someone, this is a good example of how to do everything wrong."
Six days earlier in Houston, ICE officers trailed a white work van carrying a construction crew and shot the driver through an open window. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was 52, a father of three, a business owner who had lived in the United States for more than three decades without a criminal record. He was not the target either. Agents believed a passenger resembled a man they wanted.
Twice in six days, federal agents executing an arrest warrant stopped the wrong vehicle and killed the driver.
Senator Angus King put the blame where he believed it belonged. "They've been told they have to arrest 2,000 people a day by the White House," he said. "That's a terrible way, an instruction, to give law enforcement. What happened today in Maine is a result of that."
Which is how a man like David Brouillette ends up with a gun and a badge.
None of this is a surprise to anyone who studies policing. Research has consistently found domestic violence to be more common in the families of law enforcement officers than in the general public -- by most estimates two to three times more common -- and the problem goes largely untracked, because no federal agency counts it and departments have little incentive to.
Federal law has recognized the danger for thirty years: the Lautenberg Amendment bars anyone convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence from carrying a firearm, on the reasoning that a man who beats his wife should not be handed a gun and a badge.
Brouillette had no conviction. He had something a background check is designed to find anyway -- a decade of filings in Maine's family courts, and a judge who had already decided he should not have guns.
By ICE's own account, its hiring process reviews an applicant's criminal history and credit, and includes a background investigation that interviews prior employers and associates. The agency says it takes weeks. Brouillette's paper trail included that fi****ms order, a child protective services call, and a volunteer fire department that had removed him for screaming at a supervisor and refusing to obey. Two ex-wives had been documenting his violence in Maine's courts for the better part of a decade. None of it stopped them.
An internal ICE email obtained by Reuters in February warned supervisors that the "high volume of new hires" and stalled background checks were creating uncertainty about recruits' pasts. Officials told NBC News that some recruits arrived at the training academy in Georgia without having submitted fingerprints for a background check at all, and that more than two hundred were dismissed mid-training for failing requirements that should have stopped them long before -- one of them a man whose record included a battery charge from a domestic violence incident, discovered only after he was already in the building.
"There is absolutely concern that some people are slipping through the cracks," a current Homeland Security official said. "What about the ones who don't admit it?"
The hiring surge that produced David Brouillette was enormous, and it was fast. Homeland Security announced in January that it had brought on twelve thousand new ICE officers, roughly doubling the agency in a year. To fill the slots it offered signing bonuses of up to fifty thousand dollars, dropped the college degree requirement, and lowered the minimum age to eighteen.
Training was cut to keep up. Documents released by Senate Democrats showed the program had shrunk by roughly forty percent, from 584 hours last July to about 336 by February. Ryan Schwank, a former ICE lawyer responsible for training new deportation officers, described what had been taken out of it.
"For the last five months, I watched ICE dismantle the training program," he said, "cutting 240 hours of vital classes from a 584-hour program -- classes that teach the Constitution, our legal system, fi****ms training, the use of force, lawful arrests, proper detention and the limits of officers' authority."
The agency denied it. Then, in June, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told the House Homeland Security Committee something much closer to Schwank's version. "We had to rewrite the curriculum," he said. "All training starting July 1st will be back up to the regular standards." Guerrero was killed on July 13.
The department will not confirm that David Brouillette fired the shots that killed Guerrero.
So it was left to the women in his life to say his name.
His daughter says he called her and admitted he had killed a man. He called Ashley too, begging for her help. "He said, 'You need to tell them I'm a good person.'" He asked her not to tell anyone that he had abused her during their marriage.
She said no. "I told him that I wouldn't lie for him."
She has been trying to make somebody listen for seventeen years.
"I feel like even though I tried to bring awareness to his mental health conditions before and I got ignored," she said, "that I really need to push and be heard now and hopefully prevent something like this from happening again."
** Thank you to these courageous women who spoke up, and who kept speaking even when no one listened! **
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None of this had to happen -- and none of it will change on its own. Here's how to demand accountability:
--> To help Guerrero's widow and her three-year-old daughter, a GoFundMe campaign has been launched at https://www.gofundme.com/f/justice-and-support-for-johan-sebastians-family
--> Call your Senators and Representatives at (202) 224-3121. Demand full, independent, and public investigations into the killings of Joan Sebastian Guerrero and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo -- and demand that Congress hold hearings, because the last time an ICE agent killed someone, the Justice Department shut the investigation down and went after the victim's widow instead.
Demand that no recruit be armed before a full background check, including protective orders and family court records, and that no surge hire carry a weapon before completing the training ICE admits it gutted.
Also demand that ICE reinstate the halt on vehicle stops it announced and then abandoned, that every immigration agent be equipped with a body camera, and that Congress end the arrest quotas -- 2,000 people a day -- that put undertrained agents in lethal situations.
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For a potentially life-saving book for older teens and adults about the early warning signs of abusive relationships, myths about abusive personalities, and how to get help, we highly recommend "Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men" at https://www.amightygirl.com/why-does-he-do-that
For children's books that encourage empathy and understanding of Mighty Girl immigrants of the past and present, visit our blog post, "A New Land, A New Life: 25 Mighty Girl Books About the Immigrant Experience" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=12855
For books for children and teens about the importance of standing up for truth, decency, and justice, even in dark times, visit our blog post, "Dissent Is Patriotic: 50 Books About Women Who Fought for Change," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=14364
For books for tweens and teens about girls living under real-life authoritarian regimes throughout history that will help them appreciate how precious democracy truly is, visit our blog post "The Fragility of Freedom: Mighty Girl Books About Life Under Authoritarianism" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=32426
To stay connected with A Mighty Girl, you can sign-up for A Mighty Girl's free email newsletter at https://www.amightygirl.com/forms/newsletter
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To read the AP report on David Brouillette's history of violent behavior, visit https://www.wbur.org/news/2026/07/17/maine-shooting-ice-officer-violent-background
It has also been documented in detailed on NPR at https://www.npr.org/2026/07/17/nx-s1-5897460/maine-ice-shooting-brouillette and the New York Times at https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/18/us/david-brouillette-ice-agent-maine.html
To read the Portland Press Herald's reporting on the killing of Joan Sebastian Guerrero -- including the scene at Pool and Hill Street, where his three-year-old daughter stood in her pajamas beside his body -- visit https://www.pressherald.com/2026/07/13/immigration-agent-kills-man-in-biddeford-spurring-protests/
For the Associated Press account, including Daniel Boucher's testimony that he heard Guerrero say "I tried to stop," visit https://apnews.com/article/ice-shooting-maine-immigration-dhs-f26f8c2256aa6f0748582ea4adbb515c
To read CNN's reporting on the Department of Homeland Security's twelve hours of silence -- and the reaction of federal law enforcement officials shocked by its statement -- visit https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/13/us/live-news/maine-ice-shooting-houston-minnesota
