On July 13, 2026, Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero — a 25-year-old Colombian worker with a valid work permit and Social Security number — was sh0t and k1lled by ICE officer David Michael Brouillette in Biddeford, Maine. He was not the target of the federal warrant being executed that day. In the days that followed, Brouillette’s ex-wife came forward with a voicemail recording — made in late 2025, around the time he was hired by ICE — in which he threatened to have her and every woman in her family’s ‘f——g throats cut.’ The question that recording raises is simple and devastating: how did this man get a federal badge?
What Durán’s Last Words Actually Said
Durán Guerrero was not fleeing. He was not the subject of any warrant. Witness Daniel Boucher, who was present in the Biddeford neighborhood and listened to audio captured on nearby security cameras, reported hearing Durán speak after being sh0t: “I tried to stop.” Those four words — recorded, witnessed, and reported to the Portland Press Herald — directly contradicted the account Brouillette would later offer his ex-wife over the phone: that Durán had tried to run him over and the shooting was justified. Video evidence and additional witness accounts did not support that claim either. Much like other cases where ICE field tactics have been disputed, what the cameras and witnesses captured told a fundamentally different story than what the officer reported.
After the shooting, Brouillette called his ex-wife, Ashley Brouillette, admitted to the shooting, and asked her to lie on his behalf. She refused. That refusal — and the voicemail she had already saved from months earlier — became the clearest window into who had been entrusted with federal enforcement power in Maine.
The Voicemail That Federal Hiring Never Caught
The recording, made in late 2025 and provided by Ashley to the Associated Press and CBS News, runs three minutes. In it, Brouillette mocks his ex-wife for taking out a protection order against him, calls her ‘disgusting’ repeatedly, and then lands on this: “And all of you should have your f——g throats cut… Am I threatening that I’m gonna do that? Nope. But do I think that you should have your f——g throats cut? Or should have had them cut? Yep.” He extended the threat to every woman and girl in her bloodline.
Leaked audio of David Brouillette, the ICE agent who killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine, reveals threats to kill his ex-wife:
“Every single female in your bloodline is nothing but a disgusting, fat [?]. All of you should have your throats slit.”…
— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) July 22, 2026
This is not a clip stripped of context. It is a three-minute recording in which a man who was, at that point, either being vetted for or already employed by ICE — an Army veteran with prior work across Maine state corrections, public safety, and health services — spelled out in calm, unhurried language that he believed his former partner and her female relatives deserved to d1e. Family court records, reported alongside the audio, detailed additional allegations of physical ab*se, har*ssment, and severe mental health struggles. Federal background checks did not flag any of it as disqualifying.
The Accountability Question Nobody in Power Has Answered Yet
The release of the voicemail triggered immediate demands from lawmakers and immigration advocacy groups for a formal accounting of ICE’s vetting process. The central question is not complicated: if a protection order, family court abuse allegations, and a recorded threat against multiple people’s lives did not prevent Brouillette from being hired, armed, and deployed for field enforcement operations, then the background check process is not functioning as a safeguard — it is functioning as a formality.
Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero had documentation. He had a work permit and a Social Security number. He said he tried to stop. None of that protected him from an officer whose own ex-wife had evidence — documented, recorded, court-filed evidence — that he had no business holding a federal badge. The case for state and federal investigations into the Biddeford sh00ting and the hiring standards that made it possible is not a political argument. It is what the tape says.
