A Maine Killing, and RI's Own Vetting Blind Spot

On the morning of July 13, in Biddeford, Maine, a 25-year-old Colombian food-delivery driver named Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was shot in the head inside his car by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer. The Department of Homeland Security's account is that agents attempted a stop, "the vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon." The agents were looking for someone else — a person subject to a removal order — and DHS has acknowledged Durán Guerrero was not that man. He had a Social Security number and authorization to work. He left behind a wife and a three-year-old daughter.

That happened two hours up I-95 from here. The reason it belongs in a Rhode Island paper is not geography but procedure: the questions the shooting has forced open — who gets a badge and a gun, who checks, and what happens to an officer whose record follows him — are questions this state has spent years declining to answer about its own police.

Start with the federal side, because the numbers there are documented. ICE announced in January that it had hired 12,000 new officers and agents in under a year out of roughly 220,000 applications, a scale of expansion no agency absorbs cleanly. To move that many people through the door, the agency compressed its Basic Immigration Enforcement Training Program from 72 days to 42. Ryan Schwank, a former ICE attorney who taught at the academy and resigned on February 13 before filing a whistleblower complaint with Congress, told a congressional forum the training had become "deficient, defective and broken," and has said the cuts eliminated 16 hours of firearms instruction along with coursework on constitutional law. DHS denied for months that anything meaningful had been trimmed. Then, on June 3, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told the House Homeland Security Committee that training would return to 72 days effective July 1 — and that "we had to rewrite the curriculum." An internal ICE memo obtained by CBS News confirmed the extension and added a supplemental Advanced Field Officer Training Program for the thousands already onboarded under the short version. That is an agency conceding, in the passive voice bureaucracies reserve for such things, that it deployed armed officers it had not finished preparing.

Vetting appears to have moved just as fast. ICE has said publicly that some applicants received "tentative selection letters" and began work on a temporary status before full background checks were completed. NBC News reported in October that current and former DHS officials found recruits arriving at the training course without having submitted fingerprints, as ICE's own hiring process requires.

Which brings us to the officer. David Brouillette, 37, of Gardiner, Maine — Maine National Guard, then Army with an Afghanistan deployment, then a corrections officer, then a VA police officer at Togus — was hired by ICE within the past year. Hundreds of pages of court records document a yearslong trail of abuse allegations from two ex-wives, including a filing alleging he once threatened to kill one of them with a gun, and protective orders requiring him to surrender firearms. Those are allegations; he has not been convicted of a domestic violence crime, and a conviction is what triggers the federal firearms bar under the Lautenberg Amendment. But allegations of that gravity are precisely what a background investigation exists to surface and weigh. Both women told the Boston Globe, which reviewed the court file, that no one from ICE ever called them.

Now bring it home. Rhode Island remains one of a small handful of states with no process for decertifying a police officer for misconduct — no mechanism, in other words, to stop an officer who leaves one department under a cloud from turning up sworn and armed in the next town over. Legislation to create one, H-7312 and its Senate companion, died in committee in 2024; the ACLU of Rhode Island supported it while warning in written testimony that its grounds were far narrower than most states', limited to felony convictions and certain federal crimes, where two-thirds of states permit decertification without any criminal conviction at all. "It's not just an issue of Rhode Island being one of the few states in the country that doesn't have a decertification law," ACLU executive director Steven Brown has said. "Rhode Island has always been a secretive state when it comes to police misconduct." The state POST commission moved in 2021 to inactivate certification when an officer departs, but it cannot feed names into the National Decertification Index without decertification authority to begin with — a database that itself holds records on 30,172 officers from 45 states, is not public, and is checked by few departments before hiring.

Duke law professor Ben Grunwald's research on "wandering officers" — those fired or pushed out of one agency and hired by another — found they draw disproportionate misconduct complaints at their new jobs. The mechanism is not exotic. It is simply that nobody with the power to say no ever learns what there is to know.

ICE has been working Rhode Island streets. In Central Falls on March 4 of last year, agents were alleged to have surveilled and grabbed a man off the street near a school; a Providence arrest that July put city police officers on body camera alongside federal agents and triggered a mayoral investigation. Lieutenant Governor Sabina Matos put it bluntly in a January 16 statement: "Allowing these barely-trained and reckless federal agents to blunder through our state, disrupting the justice system and harassing children and judges, diminishes the safety of our citizens and undermines the efforts of real law enforcement officers."

She's right about the federal agents, and she's describing a standard Rhode Island has never held itself to. The General Assembly has adjourned; the next chance to pass a decertification law is January. Vetting, like a good ragù, does not survive being rushed — you either give it the hours or you serve something nobody should have to swallow.