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Benjamin R. Gideon is a 1999 graduate of Yale Law School, founder of the law firm GideonAsen LLC, and the attorney representing the Durán Guerrero family.
I have spent nearly three decades as a lawyer. I have sat with grieving families more times than I care to count. But nothing prepared me for the conversations I have had with Karolina Alvarez, the mother of a 3-year-old girl whose father, Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, was shot dead by ICE agents on a residential street in Biddeford, on July 13.
A few facts about Johan. He was 25 years old. He had a valid federal work permit. He was on his way to work. He was not the person the agents were looking for.
Six weeks later, Vice President JD Vance stood at a political rally in Maine on Monday and offered his own verdict on this case. Asked about the killing, he assured the crowd that “the Trump administration” and “our Department of Justice” were investigating. Then, in the next breath, he pivoted to lecture Mainers that they should be more worried about fentanyl deaths than about a shooting involving what he called “an illegal alien.” “Have a little bit of perspective,” he said.
I would like to offer some perspective.
To date, no federal official or agency has contacted Johan Sebastián’s family, his partner, or me, his family’s lawyer. Nobody has told us what agency is investigating, what the scope of that investigation is, or who is running it. If this is what a serious federal investigation into a fatal shooting by government agents looks like, I would hate to see what indifference looks like.
The vice president’s suggestion that this killing was somehow an acceptable cost of fighting the fentanyl trade is not just callous. It is false, and he should know it is false.
Maine recorded 390 fatal overdoses from all drugs combined in 2025 — not “tens of thousands,” as Vance claimed. Even counting every fatal overdose in this state going back to 1997, the cumulative total is roughly 7,600. Fentanyl deaths are a fraction of that.
And no one — not the Department of Homeland Security, not ICE, not the vice president himself — has ever suggested that Johan Sebastián had any connection whatsoever to the drug trade. The operation that killed him was an interior immigration action, nothing more.
Nor can this administration take credit for Maine’s improving overdose numbers. Fatal overdoses in this state fell nearly 16 percent in 2023 and another 19 percent in 2024 — before President Donald Trump ever returned to office. Maine’s own data describe 2025 as the third consecutive year of decline.
The facts simply do not support the story the vice president is telling.
What troubles me most, as a lawyer, is how casually Vance discussed the actual killing. He conceded that Johan Sebastián “was not part of the underlying investigation.” Then he said officers approached him, he drove away, and law enforcement “argued” that he posed a danger to the community.
But he had no weapon. There was no violent act.
And no specific threat named. Just a young father driving away from armed agents on his way to work at 7 in the morning.
Vance went to law school at Yale. He knows there was no probable cause to arrest Johan Sebastián in the first place. He knows federal deadly-force policy forbids shooting a fleeing driver simply to prevent an escape, and permits it only when an officer reasonably believes the person poses a significant threat of death or serious physical harm.
He knows firing at a moving vehicle is not justified by vague characterizations of “danger.” Yet he stood before a crowd and offered exactly that justification anyway — echoing his earlier false claim that an ICE officer who killed a woman in Minneapolis enjoyed ” absolute immunity.”
Words from a sitting vice president carry weight. When those words misstate the law governing the use of deadly force, they don’t just insult a grieving family, they put every other person that federal agents encounter on our streets at greater risk. I urge Vance to correct the record now, before his words are read by another agent as license to pull the trigger.
Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was somebody’s father. He deserves an investigation. His family deserves the truth. And the American public deserves a vice president who does not distort simple facts to excuse a killing.