There are immigration enforcement operations and there are immigration enforcement operations that produce, by Monday morning of the week that follows them, a body on a street in Biddeford, Maine surrounded by federal agents while state investigators rush to the scene, and the Trump administration’s ongoing operations in Maine have produced the second kind.
ICE agents shot and killed a person in Biddeford, Maine on Monday morning, per Raw Story’s confirmed report published 42 minutes ago, in what Maine House Speaker Ryan Fecteau, a Democrat who represents Biddeford, confirmed on Facebook. State Police and the Department of Public Safety were on the scene. Fecteau said he expects the FBI to take over the investigation, which is the jurisdictional handoff that happens when federal agents kill someone during a federal operation. The administration has not yet released the name of the person killed or the circumstances that ICE considers sufficient justification for the shooting, which is the standard timeline for these releases.
The Bangor Daily News reports this is at least the 11th fatal shooting involving ICE or Border Patrol agents since Trump took office in January 2025. Earlier this month in Houston, Texas, ICE agents fatally shot Lorenzo Araujo, 52, a construction worker, sparking mass protests. His shooting prompted the same sequence: a DHS spokesperson said he “weaponized his vehicle,” the agency provided no immediate evidence, a family was told what happened after the fact, and the community was described as traumatized.
Biddeford is familiar with ICE. Earlier this year the agency ran “Operation Catch of the Day” in Maine, a mass enforcement sweep that detained nearly 200 people statewide, of whom only 11 had criminal convictions. The administration had described the targets as “the worst of the worst.” Fecteau called it “warrantless, indiscriminate, and quota-driven.” Sen. Susan Collins, the Republican incumbent who is watching her state’s Democratic Senate replacement situation with the patience of a woman who has been watching things for 29 years, pressed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem about the operation until ICE officially ended it in late January.
The Trump administration has been defending ICE shooting fatalities by noting that the death rate, expressed as a percentage of the ballooning detained population, is 0.009 percent. That is the statistic you cite when you have already decided the people doing the dying are an acceptable denominator.
When the 11th fatal ICE shooting since January happens in a state where 189 of 200 people swept in a mass operation had no criminal conviction, what exactly is the “worst of the worst” referring to?
Sources
Raw Story: ICE quickly cordons off body after agents kill another person
