A federal immigration agent shot and killed a person in a vehicle on Monday morning in the coastal city of Biddeford, Maine, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
The state’s governor, the city’s mayor and other elected officials said they were seeking details, and demanded a full investigation of the killing. It was the second fatal shooting in a week involving an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent firing into a vehicle.
The Homeland Security Department said in a statement on Monday evening that at about 7 a.m., ICE agents had been monitoring the last known address of someone who was in the country illegally, for whom they had a removal order. “An illegal alien departed the residence in a vehicle,” the statement said.
The agents then conducted a vehicle stop, and “the driver weaponized his vehicle towards law enforcement,” prompting an officer to fire at the driver, according to the statement. The driver was struck and died from his injuries, the statement said.
As of Monday evening, no video evidence confirming the government’s version of events had emerged. It is unclear from the department’s statement whether the driver was the person agents had been seeking.
A spokesman for Senator Angus King of Maine, an independent, said the senator had spoken with Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary. The secretary initially told Mr. King that the person who was shot had been ordered to leave the country and had been the target of an arrest warrant.
But according to the spokesman, Mr. Mullin called the senator hours later to correct that information, telling him that the driver had not been the target of a warrant. “He said they were looking for someone, essentially, and the person they shot was not the person they were looking for,” the King spokesman, Matthew Felling, said.
Social media video shot early Monday showed agents surrounding a still body at an intersection in a residential neighborhood of Biddeford, next to a car with bullet holes in the windshield, as local police officers arrived at the scene.
Liam LaFountain, Biddeford’s mayor, called for “a full, thorough and transparent investigation into this fatal incident,” in a statement, adding, “We will get answers, but we do not have them yet.”
Maine’s attorney general, Aaron M. Frey, said in a statement that according to initial reports, a deportation officer was “conducting an enforcement operation related to a final order of removal when the subject attempted to flee in a vehicle in the direction of the officer and was fatally shot.”
Two advocacy groups, the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and Presente! Maine, said in a joint statement that a 26-year-old Colombian man had died in the encounter. Project Relief, another immigrant advocacy organization, said the man had a partner and a young child.
The source of the advocates’ information was unclear, and could not be immediately confirmed with the authorities.
At a news conference in Portland on Monday afternoon, Mr. King said it appeared that the agents were not wearing body cameras.
The shooting came amid an aggressive ramp-up of immigration arrests nationally in recent weeks. Daily arrests of immigrants in the United States doubled in the last week of June and have continued to climb.
Last week, federal immigration agents killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican construction worker and father of three who had lived in the country for more than 30 years without legal status. Mr. Salgado Araujo, 52, was not the initial target of the officers who pursued his vehicle in Houston, and the agents were not using body cameras.
In Maine, a statewide enforcement surge began in January. Residents of Biddeford, a city of roughly 22,000 about 20 miles south of Portland, said that ICE agents had been there frequently in recent months.
People who live near the intersection where the shooting took place on Monday said that it happened at about 7:15 a.m. In interviews, several reported hearing gunfire, then seeing a body on the ground next to a car.
Mia Covino, 26, who lives nearby, said that she heard four or five gunshots and dropped to the floor inside her home. She then peeked from her window, she said, and saw two law enforcement agents in plain clothes and green vests in the street, and a white car slowly spinning in circles in the intersection.
One of the agents was holding onto one of the car’s door handles, “yelling, ‘He tried to run me over,’” Ms. Covino said. The other agent was telling his colleague “to stop, to relax, to calm down,” she added.
Another vehicle, which appeared to belong to the federal agents, bumped into the circling car and stopped it, Ms. Covino said, adding that agents then pulled a man from the driver’s seat and onto the ground. He was covered in blood, she said.
Mary Hayes, who also lives nearby, said she looked outside at about 7:30 a.m., after seeing social media posts about the shooting. She saw a white car with the driver’s side window blown out, she said, and bullet holes in the windshield.
There was also a woman on her knees, screaming, Ms. Hayes said, alongside a young girl with a pink backpack who was being comforted by another child.
“I heard agony,” Ms. Hayes said. “I heard a howl that came from your soul, that your whole life had just changed and it was never going to be the same.”
Daniel Boucher, 71, said he was getting ready for work in his apartment when he heard gunshots that sounded like firecrackers. When he went downstairs to look, he said, he saw a man being pulled out of a car.
Mr. Boucher said he yelled at the ICE agents after the shooting. “What a disgusting thing to do,” he recalled saying. An agent responded, Mr. Boucher said, by saying that the driver had tried to hit him with his car.
Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, said in a statement that the Maine State Police and other agencies were consulting with federal officials “to determine the facts of what occurred this morning.” Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican, called for “a full and impartial investigation.”
The state, which has an aging population, has in recent decades welcomed immigrants who have helped breathe new life into the economy, and now represent about 5 percent of the population.
In the early 2000s, Maine received a large influx of refugees from Somalia, and it has since resettled people fleeing conflict in other African countries and the Middle East.
It has also attracted a growing number of immigrants from Latin America, many of whom live in Biddeford, a working-class town on the coast.
Talla Fall, who is originally from Senegal, said he lives near where the shooting took place and works at a McDonald’s nearby. ICE agents have been in the neighborhood “every day, every week,” he said.
Hundreds of immigrants were detained during the January enforcement surge, which ICE called “Operation Catch of the Day,” a reference to the state’s commercial seafood and lobster industry.
“Everyone thought the surge was over, but ICE has been present — and in larger numbers,” said Anna Welch, founding director of the refugee and human rights clinic at the University of Maine School of Law.
The shooting on Monday, she said, “raises serious concerns about what kinds of protocol and training agents are getting to ensure that violence doesn’t escalate to the point of someone being shot in the head.”
Reporting was contributed by Christina Morales, Aric Toler, Soumya Karlamangla and Allison McCann.
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