More than 85 people gathered outside Bangor City Hall on Monday night to protest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement after one of its officers killed a man in Biddeford this morning.
The man, identified by a neighbor to the Portland Press Herald as 26-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero, originally from Colombia, was fatally shot at 7:17 a.m. in the small York County city.
Bangor protesters chanted sporadically outside the building where city councilors were meeting for an unrelated workshop and held signs with slogans like “Abolish ICE.”
“How many dead bodies are we going to have to expect before real action is taken?” said Brendan Davison, who is affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America and was part of a group of community members and groups that organized the demonstration.
Officers shot the man in Biddeford after they hit the passenger side of his car with their SUV and he attempted to flee toward an officer, according to witnesses. ICE said the officer shot “fearing for public safety.”
U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Sen. Angus King that the man was not the target of the ICE warrant. The Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and Presente! Maine have said the victim had authorization to work in the U.S.
Several protesters in Bangor criticized U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, who has faced criticism for her deciding vote that provided $70 billion over three years to ICE and Border Patrol.
“I think this is a nail in the coffin for Susan Collins,” Paige Loud, one of the candidates vying to replace Graham Platner as Maine’s democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, told a reporter outside city hall. Loud, a social worker from Old Town, was one of several candidates who attended a protest in Biddeford earlier in the day.
She added that she thinks Collins enabled the fatal shooting by voting to fund ICE and that the day’s events in her home state have tanked the five-term senator’s chances of beating whichever candidate the Democratic Party chooses to face her in the general election this fall.
In a statement Monday, Collins said the shooting “requires a full and impartial investigation of what happened. It is my understanding that the Biddeford police have secured the site and that the FBI is investigating.”
Robert Siddall, a farmer from Ellsworth, traveled to Bangor for the protest Monday. “There’s some of us who are getting pretty frustrated,” he said, adding that while he appreciates local and state law enforcement, “the feds are out of control.”
Protests have sprouted across the state in the hours following the shooting, including one outside Collins’ Biddeford office.
ICE’s enforcement actions in Maine, which have continued following a surge in January that it dubbed “Operation Catch of the Day,” are closer to home than some Bangor residents may realize, according to multilingual teacher Rose Pompey.
“My students and their families are being terrorized by ICE,” she said outside city hall, reporting that a student recently got a message while in her class that his older brother and guardian had been detained by federal immigration agents.
The crowd began to thin as some protesters went inside for the 7 p.m. City Council meeting, where several residents spoke about the shooting during public comment.
City Councilor Susan Faloon also addressed it at the end of the meeting, saying, “My heart goes out to the person who lost his life today in Biddeford and the family and the whole community. I hope that we never, ever have to face anything like that here in Bangor. And I hope that people can let the investigation play out and not make judgments on that.”