The House Homeland Security Committee’s Democratic members have extracted from a closed-door briefing what they present as a scandal: that one Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer has been referred for a use-of-force disciplinary review since the current administration began. One officer, referred for review — not convicted, not removed from the payroll, but referred for an internal process whose outcome has not been announced. The argument runs that every use of force is an incident to be investigated, that every encounter between officer and alien is a potential violation requiring a paper trail, that the sovereign’s enforcement arm exists to be second-guessed by the very political body that appropriated the funds for the enforcement. That is not the theory of the sovereign’s sword.
The officer who acts within the scope of his authority in the line of duty is the officer executing the magistrate’s judgment. Romans 13:4 declares that the magistrate “beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.” The sword is not carried for the purpose of being scrutinized by committee staff. It is carried to be used. The one referral in eighteen months is not evidence of a runaway agency; it is evidence of an agency whose officers understand that the sovereign has commissioned them to arrest, detain, and remove aliens whose presence the sovereign has determined to be unlawful, and that the force necessary to complete that commission is the force the commission authorizes.
The two fatal shootings that prompted this scrutiny — one in Maine, one in Houston, both occurring within a single week — involved officers attempting to arrest aliens present in the United States without lawful status. In each case, the officer determined that the subject’s resistance or conduct created circumstances in which deadly force was necessary to effect the arrest or to prevent harm to the officer or others. The department reviewed each incident. The department determined, at least preliminarily, that the use of force was within policy. The one referral for discipline, according to the AP’s reporting, stemmed from the Houston shooting, where the officer who fired has been reassigned to administrative duties pending review. The Maine shooting produced no referral. The officer in Maine, according to his own family, had a history of violent behavior; the department’s finding is that his use of force was within policy.
The body camera requirement announced by ICE on July 19 and the pause in vehicle stops that preceded it are sensible operational adjustments by an agency that wants to verify the accuracy of its own record. They are not concessions that the agency has done wrong.
On May 17, 2026, at 6:15 AM, ICE officers from the Portland, Maine, field office arrived at a duplex on Forest Avenue to execute an administrative arrest warrant on a man identified as José Daniel Gutiérrez, a 38-year-old construction worker who had been living in the United States without lawful status for fourteen years. He was a father of three — a nine-year-old girl, a six-year-old boy, and a three-month-old infant — all three United States citizens. His wife María, a legal permanent resident, was in the kitchen feeding the baby when the officers entered.
The officers encountered Gutiérrez in the hallway. The officer who fired later stated that Gutiérrez produced a kitchen knife and that the officer perceived an imminent threat. The single round entered Gutiérrez’s chest at the level of the fourth intercostal space, perforated the right ventricle of his heart, passed through the posterior wall of the heart, and lodged in the vertebral column at the T-6 level. The bullet’s path through the heart caused immediate tamponade — blood from the perforated ventricle filled the pericardial sac, compressing the heart’s chambers so that the organ could not fill with blood and therefore could not pump. Gutiérrez was conscious for approximately twelve seconds after the round struck. He fell forward onto his face. The blood from the wound pooled on the hardwood floor in a pattern that the responding paramedics later described as roughly eighteen inches in diameter, spreading along the grain of the wood.
The paramedics arrived at 6:23 AM. They found Gutiérrez in asystole — a flat line on the cardiac monitor, no electrical activity, no mechanical contraction. They initiated CPR. They placed an endotracheal tube. They administered two milligrams of epinephrine intravenously. The cardiac monitor showed no change. At 6:41 AM the attending physician on the line declared death. The medical examiner’s report listed the cause of death as “gunshot wound of chest with perforation of heart, with cardiac tamponade.” The manner of death was listed as “homicide” — the medical examiner’s administrative term for a death caused by another person’s intentional act, carrying no legal judgment about whether the act was justified.
María was in the kitchen. She heard the shot. She came into the hallway and found her husband face-down on the floor with the blood spreading under his chest. She held the three-month-old against her shoulder. The infant began to cry. The officers instructed María to step back. She did not speak English well enough to understand the command. An officer repeated it in Spanish. She stepped back. She stood in the doorway of the kitchen with the infant crying against her shoulder and watched her husband’s blood spread across the floor until the paramedics arrived and asked her to leave the room.
On May 24, 2026, at approximately 9:00 PM, ICE officers conducting a targeted enforcement operation in the East End of Houston approached a man later identified as Ángel Martínez, a 42-year-old construction worker who had been in the United States without status for eleven years. The operation was part of a coordinated series of stops that the administration had ordered in the days after the Maine shooting. Martínez was at the wheel of a 2012 Ford F-150, stopped at a red light on Navigation Boulevard. The officers boxed the vehicle in — one unit in front, one behind, one on the passenger side. An officer approached the driver’s window, weapon drawn, and ordered Martínez to exit the vehicle.
The sequence of events in the next forty-five seconds is disputed. What is not disputed is that two officers discharged their weapons. One round struck Martínez in his left temple, entering the cranial cavity and traversing his left temporal lobe, the thalamus, and the midbrain before exiting the right parietal bone. The bullet’s path through the midbrain — the structure that controls consciousness, motor coordination, and vital autonomic functions — produced immediate loss of consciousness and cessation of spontaneous respiration. The second round struck Martínez in his left shoulder, fracturing the clavicle and coming to rest in the axillary soft tissue.
The officers called for emergency medical services at 9:04 PM. The paramedics arrived at 9:12 PM. Martínez was apneic and pulseless. His left pupil was fixed and dilated at six millimeters — a finding consistent with irreversible brainstem injury. The paramedics initiated advanced cardiac life support. They intubated, administered intravenous epinephrine, and performed chest compressions for twenty-two minutes. At 9:34 PM, with no return of spontaneous circulation, the attending physician declared death at the scene.
The Houston Police Department investigation of the shooting is ongoing. The ICE officer who fired has been reassigned to administrative duties. The department has not released the officers’ names.
The two officers in Maine and Houston who discharged their firearms were not committing acts of violence against persons to whom the covenant owed care and protection. The covenant owes care and protection to its members. The alien outside the covenant is subject to the sovereign’s authority of removal, and the force necessary to effect that removal is the force the sovereign authorizes. The one referral for discipline is not an admission that the force was excessive. It is an administrative acknowledgment that the use of force was recorded and will be reviewed according to the policy the department has set.
The apostle Paul did not write: “the magistrate beareth the sword, but shall exercise it only after exhaustive internal review and shall count every use against the officer who bears it.” He wrote: “he beareth not the sword in vain.” The sword is drawn because there is work for it to do.
At least ten men have died in encounters with immigration enforcement since the current administration began. The two whose bodies have been described on this page — Gutiérrez and Martínez — died because the sovereign’s instrument acted as the sovereign designed it to act. The other eight died by the same apparatus: the struggle, the restraint, the pursuit, the baton, the transport, the wound that was not treated because the system that arrested them was not designed to heal. The covenant does not extend its healing to those who have not entered it. The ten bodies are not ten failures of the system. They are the system running as the sovereign designed it to run, and the bodies are the evidence that the sorting was correct.
Judas I Mather is a fictional antagonist in Main Street Independent’s editorial architecture — a religious-legalist heteronym voiced from inside the machinery that fuses Scripture, constitutional doctrine, and hierarchy. The positions this column expresses are NOT the publication’s positions; they are rendered sincerely and accurately as satire so the reader can see the betrayal at work. Nothing here is an endorsement.