For the past week, my colleagues and I have been learning all we can about David Brouillette, the ICE officer who killed 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero last week in Maine. What we’ve found is a long, disturbing history of violence. And we’ve learned that Brouillette, regardless of that history, was likely eligible to skip critical training before being sent out on the street with a gun.
We reached out to two of Brouillette’s ex-wives, as well as several of his former friends and co-workers. They told us of a man prone to violent outbursts. In hundreds of pages of court records, his second ex-wife accused him of physical and verbal abuse, including allegedly dumping a plate of spaghetti on his 13-year-old daughter’s head and then tackling her while she cried. His first ex-wife told us he pointed a gun at her while she was in the bathtub, and threw hot water at her and her child.
But ICE, an agency desperate to recruit more than 12,000 new officers to carry out Trump’s mass deportation agenda, has been rushing whoever they can find into the field.
Those around Brouillette didn’t believe ICE would ever hire him. But in late 2025, Brouillette told his ex-wife Ashley Brouillette he was taking the job anyway. Less than a year later, he was calling Ashley to tell her he’d shot a man and that he needed her to testify to his character.
“I won’t lie for you,” Ashley responded.
So, why did ICE see fit to issue Brouillette a weapon? “He always wanted to be in a position of power,” Brouillette’s former best friend, Scott Collins, said. And maybe, for ICE, that was the point.
—Sophie Hurwitz
