ICE gave a badge and a gun to a man his ex-wives had been warning about. Tom Homan, the man the White House put in charge of the border, went on CNN on Sunday and said the officer who killed Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero on July 13 should never have cleared vetting. Asked for the rest, he said: “We will see. It’s all being reviewed. We will see where it lies.”
The women who warned had already seen this coming. Lucinda Brouillette said it first. “A persistent pattern of abuse, intimidation, manipulation, fear and control,” her statement read. Asked if she believed her ex-husband was capable of the level of violence the killing required, she said: “Unequivocally yes.” The other ex-wife has been telling anyone who would listen the same thing for years. They have been telling anyone who would listen. Homan is now listening, in public, because the man the system hired did what Lucinda Brouillette said he would do.
Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was twenty-five years old. He was from Colombia. He was killed in Biddeford, Maine, on the thirteenth of July. The officer has been identified by news outlets as David Brouillette; DHS has not confirmed the name. There is no body camera footage. In Texas earlier in the month, an ICE officer killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. The lab results came back negative — for methamphetamine, for any drug at all. Salgado’s family said the substance in the van was a salt mixture, what he and his construction crewmates used as electrolytes in the Texas heat. Two men are dead. No body camera footage in either case. Homan has now announced that ICE will require body cameras during vehicle stops — after the first killing, and after the second.
Homan’s question is the right one. How did the vetting process fail? How did the information about David Brouillette — the police records, the ex-wives’ statements, the persistent pattern of which Lucinda Brouillette spoke — how did that information not surface? Or did it surface, and was it ignored? I want ICE to answer that question honestly, because the answer determines whether the failure was a process error or a culture. The ranking Democrat on the House homeland security committee, Bennie Thompson, said Brouillette’s alleged abusive past “directly call[s] into question the supposed vetting and training ICE does of its recruits.” Police experts have been asking the same question. Homan and Thompson are asking the same question. They should get the same answer.
I will tell you what I think. I think the failure is a culture. I think the system that hires men to enforce immigration law with a gun is not in the business of looking carefully at who they are hiring. I think the system that puts armed agents in cars and tells them to chase down people for civil violations of immigration law is not in the business of asking what kind of man an applicant is. I think the system that wants to deport millions of people has other things on its mind than whether the men with the guns have a history of violence against women. The system that wanted numbers got the numbers. The system that did not look carefully at the man with the gun got a man who killed. Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched at Selma and who lost a piece of himself in the Holocaust, said it: “Few are guilty, but all are responsible.” The system that hired David Brouillette is responsible for what David Brouillette did.
The state of Israel is commanded thirty-six times in the Torah to love the stranger. “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you,” says Leviticus 19:33-34. “You shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” The mechanism is memory. The memory of being the stranger is the precondition of welcoming the stranger. This system has lost that memory. The system that hired David Brouillette was not a system that remembered being the stranger.
In Matthew 25, the Son of Man separates the sheep and the goats on the basis of one question: did you welcome the stranger, or did you not? “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.” The system did not welcome Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. The system killed him.
Mr. Homan. You have done the right thing by saying the officer should never have cleared vetting. That is the easy thing to say. The hard thing to do is the next thing. The next thing is to ask every ICE officer hired under the same process what his vetting file looks like. The next thing is to release the body camera footage from every ICE stop in the last year. The next thing is to allow the Department of Justice to investigate the killings without conditions. The next thing is to prosecute the officers who killed Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, if the evidence supports prosecution. The next thing is to stop hiring men with histories of violence against women and calling it a vetting process. A church that does not provoke any crisis, a gospel that does not unsettle, a word of God that does not get under anyone’s skin — what gospel is that? Romero’s question. I am asking it of you.
I have to say this, because the column requires it. I know ICE officers who are good at their work. I know border patrol agents who are decent men. I do not believe ICE is composed of monsters. I believe ICE is composed of human beings working in a system that has decided, in the last two years, that what matters is volume. Volume of arrests. Volume of deportations. Volume of fear. When a system decides that what matters is volume, the vetting of the men who do the work becomes the kind of thing that gets skipped. That is what happened with David Brouillette. I have to say this, third. This is not a Republican failure. It is not a Democratic failure. It is what the system does when the system decides it wants volume. The Obama administration deported more people than any administration in American history. The Biden administration continued the pattern. The Trump administration has accelerated the pattern to a pace the system was not built for, and the hiring has been done at the same accelerated pace. The vetting did not keep up. The training did not keep up. The body cameras did not exist. The accountability was not built. The pattern is structural. The names change. The dead men are the same. The women who warned are the same. The system that did not listen is the same.
I have to say this, too. The Mexican-American community I come from has not always been kind to the women in its own midst. The Catholic parish tradition I was formed in has not always listened to the women who said they were being hurt. I am not the one to lecture anyone about the sin of ignoring the women who warn. I come from a tradition that has sometimes ignored the same women. The system failed Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. The women who warned did not fail. The women who warned are the only people in this story who saw what was coming and tried to stop it.
A humane immigration policy is not a policy of open borders. A humane immigration policy is a policy that processes asylum claims within a year, that detains people only when there is no less restrictive alternative, that hires only officers who have been screened for the kind of violence that women are most often subject to, that requires body cameras on every officer, that prosecutes officers who kill, that allows the press to publish the names of the officers, and that treats the people being processed as people. A humane immigration policy is a policy in which Lucinda Brouillette’s statement is heard by the people doing the hiring — not after the killing, but before it. A humane immigration policy is a policy in which the memory of being the stranger is the operating principle, not a Bible verse on the wall.
Mr. Homan. The door is open. You opened it on Sunday, in front of the country. The next step is yours: the vetting fixed, the body camera footage released, the killing prosecuted, the women who warned told they were right. Or you can be the man who said the right thing on Sunday and did nothing on Monday.
Lucinda Brouillette said yes when she was asked if her ex-husband was capable of this level of violence. She said yes. The system did not ask her. Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero is dead. You are the system, Mr. Homan. What will you do?