Remember Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero, 25, Who Was Shot and Killed by ICE in Biddeford on Monday, July 13, 2026. He left Behind a Widoew nd Three Year Old Daughter.
Today, the Maine Immigrants’s Rights Coalition staff joined members of Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero’s family, Biddeford Mayor LaFountain and the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project in calling on Congress to confront serious questions about Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s use of force, its expanding presence in communities across the state and its lack of accountability.
MIRC thanks Representative Chellie Pingree, Ranking Member Bennie Thompson, Representative Katherine Clark and the members of Congress who came to Biddeford to hear directly from Maine residents.
The testimony and evidence presented today require Congress to look beyond whether one officer followed one policy dudring one encounter. Johan Sebastian’s death raises a much larger question: Is ICE making our communities safer?
MIRC does not believe that the question can be answered simply by adding body cameras, identification requirements or additional training. Those are necessary guardrails, but guardrails cannot substitute for accountability and they cannot correct a mission that tht has drifted so far from its stated public-safety justiriction.
MIRC’s analysis of ICE’s own apprehension data found that 79% of people apprehended in Maine in 2024 and 2025 had no criminal conviction.
During the week of Johan Sebastian’s death, Maine’s Immigrant Defense Hotline received 128 calls. Some calls came from friends, relatives, neighbors and strangers trying to report and verify possible immigration enforcement activity. Others come after someone has already been detained – from families trying to determine where a loved one has been taken, obtain legal representation, replace lost household income, remain housed and meet basic needs.
The response to those calls stretches across Maine. Statewide organizations, locala nonprofits, legal advocates, employers, neighbors and individual community members have stepped forward to help. This is a network that represents Maine at its best. But it’s also an effort that is very demanding of resources and volunteer time — an effort aht would not have to exist if federal policy stopped throwing famililes into crisis.
“Congress heard today from the people living with the consequences of federal immigration enforcement,” said MIRC Execudtive Director Mufato Chitan. “The next measure of accountability will not be another hearing or another promise of internal review. It will be whether Congress is willing to examine the policies, funding and institutional decisions that keep producing these consequences.”
MIRC is calling on Congress to end the unchecked expansion of ICE and broad community enforcemet operation; require meaningful accountability and independent oversight when federal personnel use force; and seriously reconsider which functions ICE should continue to perform, if the agency is to continue at all.
Congress must also reconsider the billions of dollars being directed toward detention and enforcement while the immigration system people are instructed to navigate remains chronically under-resoured. Federal resources should help build a system capable of deciding cases fairly and on time — with adequate legal capacity and due-process protections.
People cannot be told to follow a process while the government refuses to adequately fund the process itself. This reality is at the core of the crisis that’s forcing people to live in fear of being separated from their families.
MIRC will continue providing policy makers with community information, federal enforcement data and the experiences of organizations and families across Maine.
Johan should have come home on July 13. Today his death was entered into the congressonal record.
WHAT MATTERS NOW IS WHAT CONGRESS DOES WITH THAT RECORD.