By CJ Gardner and Helen Coster
BIDDEFORD, Maine, July 13 (Reuters) – A person was fatally shot on Monday during an encounter with U.S. immigration agents in Maine, a top state lawmaker said, days after a man was killed by a U.S. agent during a traffic stop in Texas.
“This morning a shooting occurred in Biddeford. A person was killed. ICE was involved,” Ryan Fecteau, the Democratic speaker of the Maine House of Representatives and a native of Biddeford, wrote on Facebook.
Details remained unclear, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Department of Homeland Security officials could not be reached for comment. The FBI said it responded immediately to assist at the scene of the shooting but did not offer any additional information. The Biddeford police did not comment and referred questions to ICE.
Immigration advocates said the person shot was a 26-year-old Colombian man who was authorized to work in the U.S. and had a Social Security number, though they did not name him or say how they were able to identify him.
“This is devastating, enraging, and unacceptable,” the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and Presente! Maine said in a statement. “His loved ones deserve answers, and the public deserves a full and transparent account of what happened.”
U.S. Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine who caucuses with the Democrats, told reporters that he had spoken with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and that the person killed was a man in his 20s. King also said that the agents were apparently not wearing body cameras.
“What I said to the secretary was, we want a full, transparent and open investigation of this matter,” he said.
One eyewitness, Daniel Boucher, 71, a caregiver and part-time drafter who lives in downtown Biddeford, said in an interview that he was on the second floor of his apartment when he heard what sounded like firecrackers around 7:30 a.m.
He ran to the window and saw a white SUV ram a smaller white car more than once, causing the car to change direction. At that point, Boucher said, he saw an ICE officer get out of the SUV and try to open the other car’s door before pulling a man out.
The man, whom Boucher described as looking like a younger man, had blood on his face and his head, and the officer put him on the ground.
“Initially I remember hearing the victim say, ‘But I tried to stop,'” Boucher said.
An officer who appeared to be the one who shot the man looked “very distraught, almost in shock,” according to Boucher, and said that the victim had tried to ram him or hit him.
Eventually, Boucher said, the wounded man appeared to stop breathing.
“I’ll be very honest with you, I am not pro-ICE at all,” he said. “And I am a Democrat. But regardless of that, what I’m telling you is what I experienced today.”
Some videos surrounding the incident also began to emerge on Monday, including one posted on social media and verified by Reuters that showed a white car driving in what appeared to be an aimless circle, with two men wearing vests on foot trying to stop it. Photos taken at the scene showed the car with what looked like bullet holes in the windshield, stopped against the side of a large white SUV with emergency lights flashing.
PROTESTS BREAK OUT
The shooting prompted protests in Biddeford, a city of over 21,000 people 15 miles (24.1 km) south of Portland.
About 200 demonstrators gathered at a park, holding signs and chanting, before marching about a quarter mile up the road to the Biddeford office of Republican U.S. Senator Susan Collins, who is running for reelection this year.
Ten protesters entered the building’s foyer, chanting “ICE out!” and “Vote her out!” and screaming obscenities. A representative from Collins’ office came out and tried to talk to some of them. There were no arrests or violence.
Six days ago, an ICE agent fatally shot a man identified as Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston during a traffic stop, sparking protests in the city’s heavily Hispanic East End.
Hours after that shooting, ICE said in a statement that Salgado, a Mexican national living in the U.S. illegally for more than three decades, rammed a law enforcement vehicle with his van and attempted to run over an officer who fired in self-defense.
The agency has not offered evidence to support that account. In other instances over the past year, initial statements from immigration enforcement agencies about the use of force have been contradicted by video footage or other evidence, sometimes in court.
Three men who witnessed the shooting have challenged ICE’s account, a lawyer for two of the men told reporters on Friday. Salgado, a father of three, was a construction worker in the process of obtaining a work permit, relatives have said.
The shootings took place amid a nationwide surge in arrests of immigrants as part of President Donald Trump’s federal crackdown on migrants that has drawn objections from local Democratic leaders and protests in multiple cities.
Democratic U.S. Representative Chellie Pingree, who represents Biddeford in Congress, said in a video posted on Facebook after the shooting that she was “deeply disturbed and angry.”
“More than anything else, I want to know: why are you in Maine?” she said of immigration agents.
Since the beginning of June, ICE arrests in Maine have more than quadrupled to around 70 per day in early July, according to internal ICE data shared with Reuters by a source.
(Reporting by Helen Coster, Katharine Jackson, Bhargav Acharya, Daphne Psaledakis, Kristina Cooke and Fernando Robles; Writing by Joseph Ax; Editing by Susan Heavey and Mark Porter)
Comments