It Is Unacceptable That ICE Ever Hired a Man Like David Brouillette

5 min readGod love the Associated Press. In its old-fashioned, green-eyeshade way, it has delivered deadpan death blows to a lot of the bullshit fables ladled out by El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago over the past decade. Now, though, it has done an excavation into the life of David Brouillette, the ICE agent who shot and killed Johan Sebastían Durán Guerrero this week on the streets of Biddeford, Maine. It is, in the fullest sense, an American horror story.The Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who shot a Colombian man in Maine this week is an Army veteran who has struggled with serious mental health issues since early childhood and never should have been given a badge and gun to patrol American streets, several of his close relatives told The Associated Press. David Brouillette has a history of terrifying and violent behavior, according to those relatives. They accuse him of attacking women in his life over the years, and one shared a voicemail with the AP from last winter in which he told her that he thought someone should slit her throat.As the AP politely but firmly points out, this is a story of how the ICE process for vetting its new recruits has collapsed completely since the 2024 election brought this administration into power, if there was a vetting process at all.Brouillette, 37, told his ex-wife Ashley Brouillette late last year that he had been hired by ICE. She said that because of his long history of psychiatric issues, she thought he was having a mental health episode and she didn’t believe him. She didn’t realize he’d been telling the truth until this week, when videos began circulating online of the moments surrounding the shooting. David and Ashley Brouillette were high school sweethearts who got married in 2007. She said she divorced him in 2009 because he had become physically violent with her, which began after she got pregnant with their daughter. According to Ashley Brouillette, he once threw boiling water at her while she was holding their child—an incident her mother Avis Collins also recounted. The abuse continued after she left him, she said.The whole piece is like a slow spiral into hell. Brouillette is pretty clearly in need of intensive professional help, and he has been for quite some time. Instead, ICE gave him a badge and a gun and sent him out on the streets of Biddeford.David Brouillette doesn’t appear to have a criminal record in Maine, as a check with the Maine Department of Public Safety returned no records for him. But hundreds of family court records obtained from the Augusta District Court clerk’s office detail years of allegations of physical and verbal abuse raised by his second ex-wife on behalf of herself and his daughters. The ex-wife—whom the AP is not identifying because she fears retaliation—alleged that he had stalked and harassed her and physically and verbally abused his daughter, according to multiple requests for temporary protection orders. Brouillette tackled his teenage daughter and smashed spaghetti in her hair, and during another outburst, he dragged his daughter around the house as she cried, she said. “Dave needs counseling or something for his PTSD & depression,” she wrote in an application for a temporary protective order on behalf of his teenage daughter which a judge granted in 2021.Somebody somewhere in the vast bureaucracy of the federal government—slightly less vast after the cargo-shorts militia of DOGE was through with it—should have caught this stuff. Hell, if we still had a functioning veteran’s health-care system, somebody should have caught this guy and gotten him the help he needed.His oldest daughter, Madison Brouillette, said she also witnessed her dad’s volatility. “I watched my dad struggle a lot with a lot of things,” she told the AP. She said she came home from school once and he told her he had been sitting on a tree stump with a gun to his head. “If you don’t really, truly take care of yourself, there’s no way you can protect other people. And with my dad, he never wanted to get help,” she said.An immediate relative of David Brouillette who spoke on the condition that their name not be used said he was diagnosed with severe bipolar disorder and attention deficit disorder as a child—a diagnosis that Ashley Brouillette confirmed. The immediate relative described him as “extremely mentally ill” and said he attempted suicide twice at age 12 and was hospitalized multiple times. The relative said they’ve been estranged for years, after they broke off contact because they feared he would harm them. He did not respond to their outreach this week, the relative added.Not a land mine. Land mines are hidden. David Brouillette was a time bomb, and more than a few people heard it ticking. Too many, as it turns out.Brouillette was initially rejected by military recruiters because of his mental health diagnoses, but recruiters encouraged him to go off his medications for a year and reapply, which he did, his immediate relative said. He was eventually able to enlist.The recruiter told him to go off his meds? Somebody needs to be fired for this.According to U.S. military records, Brouillette enlisted as a chemical equipment repairer in the Maine Army National Guard but then changed jobs to be a medical logistics specialist. He was in the Guard from November 2007 until January 2010, according to records provided by the Pentagon. A 2009 article in the Kennebec Journal listed Brouillette as a private in the Maine Army National Guard’s 152nd Maintenance Company in Augusta.In January 2010 he joined the regular Army as a human intelligence collector. Brouillette deployed to Afghanistan from May 2012 to February 2013 and eventually left the Army as a sergeant in December 2015. His immediate relative believes Brouillette’s time abroad worsened his emotional struggles: “Afghanistan destroyed him—trained him to be a killing monster, a machine. They took someone who was extremely mentally ill and turned him into a killing machine.”There are so damn many tragic elements to this story that it’s hard to keep track of them all. But they all lead to one fundamental truth. Johan Sebastían Durán Guerrero is dead at 25 because David Brouillette, a violent, troubled soul who never should have been trusted with a badge, a gun, and the authority to use them, finally killed somebody. And everybody who should have cared about both men, from the Army recruiter who told Brouillette to go off his meds to the ICE recruiter who didn’t even do rudimentary diligence to the president and his administration who painted a bull’s-eye on Guerrero, didn’t give a damn. America in 2026 is so very fcking lost.