Beloved reader,

I write to you this morning from the intersection where politics, faith, and public conscience have collided again — this time on a residential street in Biddeford, Maine, where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fired at least three rounds into a white car, killing a 26-year-old father, Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. 

He was authorized to work in the United States. He was not the person ICE was investigating. He had a young daughter who followed him to the corner laundromat for quarters and candy.

Six people have died at the hands of federal immigration agents since President Donald Trump began his second-term deportation campaign. Twenty-three have been shot.

This week, the numbers took on new weight — and, at last, a partial pause.

This edition asks what has become both a pastoral and a political question: what does it mean that our government is killing people during traffic stops, and what will faithful, democratic citizens do about it?

Yours in the work, 

Rev. Dr. Jason Carson Wilson

ICE fatally shoots Colombian father in Maine; agency ordered to pause most vehicle stops. An ICE officer, not wearing a body camera, shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford on Monday while conducting surveillance on another person's home, the Department of Homeland Security said.

It’s the ninth death since January 2025 during the administration's immigration crackdown and the second fatal ICE shooting in a week.

On Tuesday, officials in the Trump administration directed ICE to suspend most vehicle stops, with narrow exceptions, according to people familiar with the decision, The Associated Press reported. Maine's congressional delegation demanded "a comprehensive, transparent, and expedited investigation."

Maine Senate Democrats unite behind abolishing ICE. With their nominee, Graham Platner, having exited the race last week amid a sexual-assault allegation he denies, the four leading Democratic candidates to challenge Republican Sen. Susan Collins converged on a once-fringe position after Monday's killing: dismantle the agency.

"It is time to abolish this broken agency," said Nirav Shah, the former director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, outside Collins' office on Tuesday.

Troy Jackson, the former Maine Senate president and a logger by trade, held an "Abolish ICE" sign at a Portland vigil. Democrats will convene on July 25 to select a replacement nominee.

Collins invokes the appropriations record; challenger says she wrote "a blank check to kill." Collins, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said she urged DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin to halt non-urgent vehicle stops and cited $20 million she secured for body cameras and $2 million for de-escalation training in the spring spending bill.

Senate Democrats' proposed reforms — mandating body cameras, restricting agents’ face coverings and banning enforcement near schools, hospitals and courthouses — were rejected by the Republican-controlled Senate.

About 6 in 10 U.S. adults told AP-NORC pollsters this year that Trump has "gone too far" in immigration enforcement.

Colombian President calls the killing "a targeted killing." In a post on X, outgoing Colombian President Gustavo Petro accused U.S. agents of treating Durán Guerrero "as an inferior being without rights" and demanded that Trump explain. Hundreds gathered for a Portland vigil Monday. Dozens of protesters gathered outside the Scarborough ICE facility on Tuesday.

The July 17 developments sit inside a broader pattern that lawmakers, courts, and regulators are increasingly forced to confront. In April, the Supreme Court, in Trump v. Barbara, struck down the president's executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship.

House and Senate appropriators are negotiating fiscal 2027 DHS funding with new urgency this week. Senate Democrats will reintroduce a package that requires body cameras for every immigration officer executing a warrant.

The proposed legislation bans face coverings during civil enforcement, prohibits operations within 1,000 feet of schools, hospitals, courthouses, and houses of worship, and establishes an independent inspector general track for use-of-force cases.

Attorneys general in New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, and California have opened formal reviews of ICE operations following the July 8 Houston shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and this week's Biddeford killing. 

Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey's office said it is "working cooperatively with federal agencies" regarding the Biddeford investigation. The officer who fired has been placed on leave; his name has not been disclosed.

Scripture doesn’t allow us to look away from a body on a Biddeford street.

"So, God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them," Genesis 1:27 declares.

A sentence that, taken seriously, forecloses the logic by which any human being can be treated, in Petro's words, "as an inferior being without rights."

James H. Cone, whose God of the Oppressed remains foundational to Black liberation theology, insisted that the God of the Exodus stands with those "in bondage" and opposes every empire that would render them disposable.

In Stand Your Ground, Kelly Brown Douglas taught us to see how "cherished property" language has always been used to justify state violence against Black and brown bodies.

Catholic social teaching speaks with equal clarity. Rerum Novarum and every social encyclical since have affirmed the dignity of the worker and the primacy of the human person over the machinery of the state.

Pope Leo XIV, in his July 4 letter marking America's 250th anniversary, praised the American commitment to "religious freedom" while urging the country to welcome immigrants — a pointed juxtaposition that our own moment demands we hear.

A father shot in a car, unarmed, while his family is across the street isn’t an enforcement anomaly. It’s a theological emergency.

Deep Dive: A Deportation Machine That Kills — And the Choice Before Us

According to The New York Times’ count, federal immigration agents have shot 23 people since January 2025.

Six are dead. Three were United States citizens: Renee Good and Alex Pretti, killed in Minneapolis in January; and Ruben Ray Martinez, killed during a Texas traffic stop in March 2025, a fact the government did not disclose publicly until February 2026. 

Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, a Mexican immigrant, was killed in Chicago last October. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, was fatally shot in Houston on July 8 while en route to a construction job.

On Monday, Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was killed in Biddeford.

Almost every shooting has involved agents firing at people in vehicles. Many survivors have been charged with assaulting a federal officer with a deadly weapon — the vehicle — a charge that carries a maximum of 20 years.

Officers in Biddeford weren’t wearing body cameras. Video from a nearby security camera, obtained by AP, shows a white car slowly circling an intersection before a law-enforcement SUV blocks its path. 

Two officers open the driver's door and drag a limp body out. A neighbor, Daniel Boucher, said he heard "pop, pop, pop" and ran to the scene. "His face was bloody. His head was bloody," Boucher told AP. "I clearly heard the victim say, 'I tried to stop.'"

The pattern isn’t accidental. It’s the visible edge of a policy architecture: unmarked vehicles, masked agents, quota-driven arrest operations, deputized state and local partners, rescinded protections for sensitive locations, and an enforcement culture that has treated "flight" as a capital offense.

The Trump administration's Tuesday order pausing most vehicle stops is a tacit admission that the agency's tactics are the problem — but the pause is not absolute, the exceptions are broad, and no structural reform has been proposed.

Historically, the modern immigration enforcement apparatus was assembled in the panicked months after 9/11; ICE itself was created in 2003.

U.S. Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), who voted against its creation and this week called Monday's killing "murder," reminds us that the agency is younger than most college students. Younger than most college students. It’s already the source of six on-duty killings in 18 months.

A prophetic tradition wouldn’t counsel patience. Howard Thurman, in Jesus and the Disinherited, described the "hounds of hell" that stalk the poor and the racialized when the state ceases to distinguish between enforcement and cruelty.

Bayard Rustin, my organization's namesake, taught that nonviolent resistance is not passivity but an active, disciplined refusal — a refusal to consent to a system that treats people as expendable.

Our nation’s choice isn’t whether to enforce immigration law. It’s whether we’ll consent to enforcement by lethal force against unarmed drivers or insist on an agency — or a successor to it — that’s accountable, transparent, restrained and consistent.

What You Can Do

•   Call your senators. Ask them to co-sponsor the Senate Democrats' pending reform package — including body cameras, face-covering restrictions, protections for sensitive locations, and independent use-of-force review. Capitol switchboard: 202-224-3121.

•   Support the Maine Immigrants' Rights Coalition and Presente!, which are supporting the Durán Guerrero family and advocating for accountability.

•   Give to the National Immigrant Justice Center or the Immigrant Legal Resource Center to fund legal defense for families targeted by enforcement operations.

•   Join a vigil or an accompaniment ministry. United We Dream, Faith in Action, and the United Church of Christ's Immigration Rapid Response Team coordinate local presence at ICE check-ins and courthouses.

•   Read and share the Brennan Center's Supreme Court Shadow Docket Tracker and the ACLU's ongoing documentation of enforcement abuses.

•   Vote in every 2026 election, up and down the ballot. Ballot-box accountability is not justice in full, but it’s not nothing.

Resources

•   Supreme Court opinion, Trump v. Barbara: supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-365_4hdj.pdf

•   The New York Times, "At Least 23 People Have Been Shot at by Federal Immigration Agents Since Last Year" (July 8, 2026)

•   The Associated Press, coverage of the Biddeford shooting and Maine Senate race, July 15-17, 2026

•   Vatican, Letter of Pope Leo XIV on the 250th Anniversary of the United States, June 25, 2026

•   Brennan Center for Justice, Supreme Court Shadow Docket Tracker

•   Bayard Rustin Liberation Initiative: www.angelictroublemakers.org

Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero brought his daughter to a laundromat, gave her quarters, and let her pick out candy. He waved to his neighbors.

Durán Guerrero came from Colombia to work, with the permission of the country that killed him. According to a neighbor's account, he said, "I tried to stop."

We’re commanded to hear him.

The Gospel doesn’t promise us the world as it is. It insists on the world as it should be and calls us to build it with our hands, our votes, our giving, our prayer, and our presence.

Grieving this week is faithful. Organizing is faithful. Refusing the numbness the empire prefers is faithful.

The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. May Johan's memory be a summons, and may our love be louder than the guns’ roar.

Rev. Dr. Jason Carson Wilson is a United Church of Christ minister, a priest in the North American Old Catholic Church, a journalist, and a public theologian exploring the intersection of faith, politics, race, LGBTQIA+ liberation, and social justice. Wilson is the founder and executive director of the Bayard Rustin Liberation Initiative and the publisher of Politically Pastoral, where he helps readers make sense of today's political landscape through the lens of progressive Christianity and public theology.

He earned a Master of Divinity from Chicago Theological Seminary and a Doctor of New Theology from The New Theology School, where Wilson developed Chosen Family Systems Theory and Chosen Family Theology. He’s currently a Doctor of Ministry candidate at Pacific School of Religion, researching how journalism and public theology can collaborate to create lasting social change.

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