THE NEW YORK TIMES: Colombian immigrant killed by ICE in Maine had legal status, father says

The father of a Colombian immigrant shot and killed by a Federal agent in Maine on Monday described him as “a good person raised with strong values,” who worked two jobs to support his wife and 3-year-old daughter.

“He had a great vision for getting ahead, so many dreams to fulfill,” Omar Duran, the father of Joan Sebastian Guerrero, told Noticias Caracol, a Colombian news outlet, on Tuesday, speaking in Spanish.

“My son is a wonderful son — I don’t know why they did that to him.”

Mr Guerrero, 25, lived in Biddeford, a small city south of Portland, where he worked as a food delivery driver and a late-night cleaner at a veterinary clinic. Mr Duran said his son was in the US legally.

In the hours after Mr Guerrero was killed on the block where he lived, details emerged to suggest that immigration agents may have mistaken him for another person.

A spokesperson for Senator Angus King of Maine said Monday that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin had told the senator that the agents had been looking for someone else.

The Department of Homeland Security said that ICE had been “conducting targeted surveillance on the last known address of an illegal alien with a final order of removal,” but it did not identify the person ICE was seeking.

In its statement, Homeland Security referred to Mr Guerrero as an “illegal alien” who “attempted to flee the scene” but did not name him, and provided no further information about his immigration status.

Mr Guerrero was from Bucaramanga, a mountainside city of about 615,000 people in north-central Colombia.

In Biddeford, he lived in a weathered three-story apartment building next to a coin-operated laundromat, which sits at the intersection where he was shot.

He and his wife and daughter would often exchange greetings with other neighbourhood residents.

“They were always so happy and so polite,” Don Gregoire, 69, a hairstylist, said of Mr Guerrero and his wife.

“I’d be watering my flowers in front of the house, and they would stop and say, ‘Very nice flowers.’ And their little girl would wave.”

Mr Guerrero had been a deliveryman for DoorDash, the company confirmed. In a statement, it said that he had not been working on the morning of his death.

The killing prompted furious protests in Biddeford and in nearby Scarborough, site of an ICE facility.

Maine’s congressional delegation called for an urgent investigation of the shooting in a letter sent Tuesday to Joseph V. Cuffari, inspector general of the Homeland Security Department.

“The facts surrounding this tragedy remain a matter of significant local concern and necessitate a thorough, objective accounting,” Senator King, an independent, Senator Susan Collins, a Republican, and Reps. Chellie Pingree and Jared Golden, both Democrats, wrote in the letter.

“Given the gravity of the situation and the understandable anxiety within the Biddeford community, we urge you to prioritise this investigation.”

The Trump administration has ordered ICE officers to halt most vehicle stops. Senator Collins said in a statement Tuesday that she had urged Mr Mullin to take the action in the wake of Mr Guerrero’s killing, the second fatal shooting in two weeks by federal agents making traffic stops.

Last week, an ICE agent fatally shot a Mexican immigrant, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, during a traffic stop in Houston. The Homeland Security Department later said that Mr Araujo was not the operation’s intended target.

An online fundraiser established by friends of the Guerrero family had raised $150,000 by Tuesday afternoon to help “cover legal expenses, funeral costs, and the repatriation of his body to Colombia, where his parents are waiting to lay him to rest,” it said.

Some of Mr Guerrero’s neighbours shared jarring details of a violent and chaotic scene Monday morning: the sound of multiple gunshots and the sight of a white car, pierced by bullet holes, making slow circles around an intersection with Mr Guerrero still in the driver’s seat.

Shortly after the immigration agents pulled him from the car, some saw Mr Guerrero’s wife, Karo Rojas, kneeling and wailing near her husband in the street as their daughter looked on.

On Tuesday, Ms Rojas shared photos of the three of them, smiling, on social media.

“I will love you all of the days of my life,” she wrote.