Last week, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed a Colombian national, Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, during a traffic stop in Biddeford, Maine. While ICE has refused to name the officer who killed Guerrero, The Associated Press has identified him as David Brouillette. And in a telling departure from its usual practices, ICE did not even try to argue that Guerrero “weaponized his vehicle” (although Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin did try to use this line at first).

The Department of Homeland Security’s official explanation is only that Guerrero tried to flee and that Brouillette shot him out of a “fear for public safety,” not his own personal safety. Guerrero is at least the 11th person shot and killed by federal immigration officials since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term. The violence at car stops has become so bad that ICE, rarely one to back down from a fight, last week ordered its agents to suspend almost all car stops, although Trump personally reversed that order the next day.

But as more details have been revealed, the core issue of the outrageous lack of vetting and proper training for ICE agents has come into greater focus. 

Shortly after the shooting, one of Brouillette’s ex-wives, Ashley Brouillette, came forward to talk about his history of mental illness and domestic violence, after he called her following the shooting to ask her to vouch for his character. The story that emerged is terrifying. Ashley told reporters that he had abused her (Brouillette did not respond to efforts by the AP to get his comments on this), and court records document extensive claims of violent abuse against another ex-wife and daughter. 

An immediate relative said that Brouillette was diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a child, was initially rejected from the military because of his mental health issues, allegedly contemplated suicide multiple times and regularly failed to hold down other law enforcement jobs after a stint in the military (including serving in Afghanistan, which family members feared only exacerbated his mental health problems). Brouillette said in court filings that he recently suffered brain damage after getting accidentally hit in the head with a steel beam pipe during a firefighting training program. Around the time he joined ICE, Brouillette left Ashley a voicemail telling her he thought she should have her throat cut, according to AP, which heard a recording of the voicemail. Both Ashley and the other ex-wife had taken out restraining orders against him, and at least one other family member said he had cut off contact out of fear. 

In fact, Ashley said that when Brouillette told her in 2025 that he had joined ICE, she assumed he was having a mental health episode and didn’t believe him, because she could not imagine that ICE would hire someone with his history. Yet ICE had in fact hired him despite all these red flags, many of them easily discoverable during a background check. 

And the most likely explanation is straight-forward: one major cost of ICE’s attempted hiring surge has been an apparent breakdown in vetting. 

Play

In February, Reuters reported on an internal ICE memo saying that the surge in new hires had overwhelmed the background check process. And while ICE denied that allegation, it’s hard to reconcile that denial with evidence given in a recent report by congressional Democrats showing that over 100 officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency were assigned to ICE — perhaps in violation of federal law — to assist with background checks. Another AP investigation found that ICE had deployed numerous new hires with problematic histories before background checks were completed, including former police officers with credible claims of abusing their authority; DHS acknowledged to the AP that some ICE agents began working on a temporary status prior to the end of their vetting.

This failure of background checks would be concerning in any context, but it is especially so here, given that there are very real concerns about the professionalism of those applying for these jobs in the first place. (ICE, for its part, maintains that the officer involved in the Biddeford shooting had a decade of federal law enforcement experience, with the use-of-force training that entails, though the agency has still not identified who that officer is.)

ICE is distinctly less popular than local police, it often pays less than many police departments (especially larger urban ones), and unlike a local police job, ICE requires deployment all across the country. All of which suggests that the pool of those applying to be ICE agents will include many of those who were unqualified to find or keep other law enforcement jobs.

People exactly like Brouillette.

Play

This adverse selection problem likely plagues not only ICE’s efforts to hire former law enforcement officials like Brouillette, but to hire fresh candidates as well — the process for which has already faced intense scrutiny over sub-par candidates. But here, too, ICE has chosen to exacerbate rather than address (or even just ignore) the problem. 

In a desperate effort to push more candidates through the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, in the fall of 2025, ICE cut new officer training from 72 days to just 42, for a total training time of about 360 hours. Even before the cuts, the training time was well below the average for U.S. police (over 100 days, and somewhere between 650 to 850 hours), and stunningly below the time many European countries require, which range from about 2,000 to 5,500 hours. 

While ICE asserted that it made no cuts to its training, and that the training it provides is sufficient, it’s still the case that ICE agents train for about two to four months, compared to 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 years for German police..

ICE did revert in July to its original 72-day program. But hundreds of agents who graduated under the shorter program are likely now out in the field, and even the 72-day program remains low by U.S. standards despite ICE recruits likely being weaker and riskier than the average police trainee.

Play

Compounding all these problems, too, is that these higher-risk, poorly trained officers are then being deployed by an agency that appears to operate with near-impunity. While Vice President JD Vance was incorrect when he said that ICE officers have “absolute immunity” from prosecution, the reality is that the FBI regularly stonewalls local officials trying to to investigate cases of lethal ICE violence. The Department of Justice has likewise dragged its feet in assisting local officials investigating ICE and Border Patrol shootings (who are pressing charges in no small part because the DOJ won’t), and the Supreme Court has made it close to impossible to sue such officers for violating people’s rights.

Poorly trained, poorly vetted, subjected to almost no meaningful oversight. The rash of recent ICE shootings shows  where that administrative strategy has taken us.

John Pfaff

John Pfaff is a professor of law at the Fordham University School of Law. He is the author of “Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform.”