Three men died within 24 hours during ICE operations in three states

Death toll rises as ICE shifts to smaller, lower-profile arrest tactics

Three men with no prior connection to one another died within a 24-hour span on July 13 and 14, 2026, during encounters with U.S. immigration officials in three states — Maine, Georgia and Florida. Two of the three had not been the intended targets of the operations that preceded them. The deaths illustrate a shift in enforcement tactics that has nonetheless produced record-high summer arrests and a steadily rising fatality count.

“Three people dying in one day is an amplification of what we’ve already seen,” Andrew Free, a former immigration attorney and investigative journalist who has for years documented ICE-related deaths, told The Guardian. “The choices that the Trump regime has made since January 2025 have had the consequence of increasing the numbers of people who die in the field and in custody.”

The first death occurred shortly after 7 a.m. on July 13 in Biddeford, a city in southern Maine. Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian national with authorization to live and work in the United States, lived with his partner, Karolina Rojas, and their three-year-old daughter. He was a food delivery driver, remembered by neighbors as a good man and hard worker. That morning, Durán Guerrero left the apartment and drove off in his white car. Minutes later, neighbors heard three pops. Durán Guerrero was dead.

ICE officer David Brouillette and other officers were reportedly looking for a different person whose last known address was where Durán Guerrero had just exited. Brouillette, 37, had recently been hired by ICE amid the agency’s push to increase arrests. The Guardian described him sitting in a federal vehicle watching the streets: a blond-brown beard, baseball cap, sunglasses and a green tactical vest marked “POLICE ICE” over a navy T-shirt. As Durán Guerrero drove away, Brouillette and the officers gave chase and attempted to stop the car. The next moments remain unclear, but neighbors heard the pops of gunfire in the quiet neighborhood. Brouillette had fatally shot Durán Guerrero.

A DHS statement said the officers had attempted to stop the vehicle and Durán Guerrero “attempted to flee,” prompting the officer to fire “fearing for public safety.” It has not been verified whether Durán Guerrero drove his vehicle in the way DHS stated. Surveillance footage obtained by the Associated Press appears to show a white car slowly driving in circles at an intersection after the shooting, with Durán Guerrero either dead or dying at the wheel. The footage then shows an ICE vehicle ramming the car to stop it. Officers open the driver’s door and Durán Guerrero’s body slumps onto the asphalt.

“He had blood on his head, blood on his face. It was gruesome, just gruesome,” a neighbor told Maine Public Radio. “I believe it was [Durán Guerrero’s] wife that was sitting on the curb across the street, just crying hysterically.” Durán Guerrero’s father, Omar Durán, told the Colombian outlet BluRadio: “My son was a person who left his country to make a future for his family.”

Reporting by the Associated Press, the Portland Press Herald and other outlets found that Brouillette was hired by the agency after years of employment instability and that family members have alleged a history of violent behavior, including accusations of domestic violence and threats. Attempts to reach Brouillette for comment were not successful. DHS has not publicly confirmed Brouillette’s identity as the officer who shot Durán Guerrero and declined to comment on his alleged personal history. The agency criticized media outlets that published his name, saying the identification put officers and their families in danger. “The ICE Office of Professional Responsibility diligently applies the proper personnel vetting regulations, including guidelines for national security, and evaluates all available information for every applicant based on these factors,” DHS said.

In Georgia on the morning of July 13, Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva, 45, was being transferred between ICE detention facilities. The Venezuelan national had been in the United States since 2021; an immigration judge ordered his removal in April 2026, a DHS spokesperson said. Arenas-Silva had hypertension, diabetes, anxiety and depression, according to a preliminary ICE death investigation report, and relied on several medications to survive. Days before his death, ICE officials arrived at his home to arrest him. His sister, Sonimar Arenas, said the family had “implored ICE not to take him due to his medical needs, but they didn’t listen to our pleas.”

Officers allowed Arenas-Silva to take only one of his medications when they arrested him, Sonimar said. In a phone call from ICE detention, Arenas-Silva told his sister that ICE had not yet provided the medication he needed. The preliminary ICE report confirmed Arenas-Silva did not have all of his necessary medication during his July 10 medical intake screening at the Irwin County Detention Center, a privately operated facility under contract with ICE. A nurse noted that the only medication he arrived with was for anxiety; the same nurse later confirmed he had other active medical prescriptions he never received.

Three days later, Arenas-Silva was being transferred to the Folkston D. Ray facility, another privately run detention center in Georgia. At 7:34 a.m., staff saw him interacting with other detainees on the transport bus. About ten minutes later, Irwin detention center staff saw he had become unconscious. Staff dialed 911 and the bus was redirected to a nearby hospital. Fifteen minutes after that, Arenas-Silva arrived at the emergency room “unresponsive and pulseless.” He was pronounced dead at 8:31 a.m.

“While in custody, Arenas-Silva received medical care and was seen by medical professionals,” a DHS spokesperson said in a statement. “ICE is committed to ensuring that all those in custody reside in safe, secure and humane environments. Comprehensive medical care is provided from the moment individuals arrive and throughout their stay. At no time during detention is a detained noncitizen denied emergency care.”

Sonimar Arenas said she is certain her brother did not receive adequate care. “I am 100% certain that he did not receive proper care,” she said in a statement. “I will seek justice for him and for everyone else who goes through this, so that other families do not have to endure what we are going through. No one deserves this.”

Less than 24 hours after the Maine and Georgia deaths, Juan Jairo Coronilla Durán, a 28-year-old Mexican tourist traveling in the United States, was the third to die. Before July 14, he had reportedly been in Atlanta, Georgia, and then traveled to St Augustine, Florida. On the morning of July 14, Coronilla Durán and three other men pulled into a gas station near a busy highway in St Augustine, just before 7 a.m. For reasons that remain unclear, federal immigration officials approached the group, and the men ran.

As Coronilla Durán fled, he repeatedly looked back to see if he was being chased. He entered the highway and at first avoided oncoming vehicles, but at the grassy median he lost his footing and fell, witnesses told the Miami Herald. He stood up, looked back at the immigration officials and continued into the next lane of traffic, where he fell again — this time in front of a tractor-trailer. “The tractor trailer immediately stopped and attempted to render aid to the victim,” the Florida Highway Patrol said in a statement.

Coronilla Durán and his wife had been married for 10 years, the Miami Herald reported, and the couple lived in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato with their then seven-month-old daughter and seven-year-old son. His wife flew to the United States days after his death to make funeral arrangements, and the Mexican government assisted in transporting his body back to Mexico. DHS has not formally identified Coronilla Durán as the victim and only said homeland security officials “conducted an operation near St Johns, Florida. Florida Highway Patrol and HSI are investigating an incident resulting in the death of a Mexican national. We will provide an update when available.” Homeland Security Investigations is part of ICE.

The three deaths remain under investigation by local and federal authorities. The FBI referred questions about the Biddeford case to the Maine attorney general’s office and the DHS inspector general’s office; the Maine attorney general’s office said it could not comment further because the investigation is ongoing. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation confirmed it is investigating Arenas-Silva’s death at the request of local county officials. A Florida Highway Patrol spokesperson said the traffic homicide investigation is ongoing with no current updates.

When The Guardian contacted DHS for comment on the three deaths, a spokesperson sent along the three previous statements the agency had issued when the deaths originally occurred in Maine, Georgia and Florida.

The three July deaths followed a year in which federal immigration enforcement had already produced confrontations and fatalities that drew sustained public backlash. Throughout 2025 and into early 2026, federal officers descended on cities including Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis in militarized gear, brandishing weapons and crowd-control sprays in high-profile raids meant to demonstrate that President Donald Trump’s promise of “mass deportations” would be fulfilled.

The tactics drew an explosion of protests and public backlash that reached a climax after the January 2026 fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis that local leaders said were protesting “an invasion” by federal immigration officials. Since then, the heavily publicized mass operations have largely disappeared.

In their place, the Department of Homeland Security has shifted to a different operational model: small groups of officers conducting low-key arrest operations, expanded 287(g) collaborations with local and state police and sheriff’s deputies deputized to make immigration arrests, faster processing with less representation in immigration court, and White House-directed collaboration to target undocumented children. The Guardian described the resulting enforcement as “quieter but just as ruthless.”

“Deaths keep ticking up even though ICE’s current tactics have been less visible than the chaos in Minneapolis at the start of the year,” Austin Kocher, an assistant research professor at Syracuse University and an immigration data and policy expert, wrote on his Substack. At least 31 people have died in 2026 during interactions with immigration officials, Kocher reported: four shot, 25 in detention and at least two, including Coronilla Durán, killed while fleeing. Arrests this summer have reached a record high, and the majority of those now being taken into custody have no criminal history, according to Kocher’s analysis.

The men who died in Maine and Florida were not the intended targets of the operations in which they were killed, agency officials told The Guardian — what those officials called “collaterals.” In Biddeford, the ICE officers who shot Durán Guerrero were reportedly looking for a different person whose last known address was the building Durán Guerrero had just exited.

Durán Guerrero’s killing prompted protests in Maine, particularly because another deadly ICE shooting had occurred days earlier in Houston. The death, together with subsequent reporting about Brouillette’s alleged personal history, prompted renewed calls for ICE to improve its hiring practices and to equip officers with body cameras. ICE officials were briefly instructed to stop pulling over vehicles.

The Maine case has also produced a detail that residents gathered at the intersection have not forgotten. As neighbors watched federal and local officers attempt first aid on Durán Guerrero, they noticed a small girl nearby wearing a pink backpack and crying. It was the couple’s daughter, who would never see her father alive again. Investigators later told Rojas that her daughter’s car seat, taken from Durán Guerrero’s car, would not be returned. A bullet had pierced it during the shooting.

Free, the former immigration attorney and legal expert on ICE-related deaths, said he expects the pattern to continue. Just over a week before The Guardian’s account, an ICE officer shot another person in Austin, Texas during an attempted vehicle stop; the man survived, The Guardian reported. “Sometime soon, we’re going to have four people die in a 24-hour period,” Free said. “And then it’s going to be five. What happens when we get there? What’s the red line? For policymakers, for states, for companies — at what time does this become indefensible or unsustainable?”