An 18-year-old named Lucas Scott watched from the street in Biddeford, Maine, on Monday as a car lurched forward toward an ICE officer. "The car was put into drive and was trying to hit the ICE officer," Scott told the Portland Press Herald. The officer fired roughly four shots. The driver, 26-year-old Colombian national Joan Sebastian Guerrero, was killed.
Kamala Harris saw the same incident and reached a different conclusion.
The former vice president took to social media on July 15 to declare that "Joan Sebastian Guerrero should still be alive" and that "anyone responsible for wrongdoing must be held accountable." She meant the agents. Not the man who allegedly used his vehicle as a weapon against federal officers. The agents.
Harris framed the shooting as part of a pattern. "This is the second time in a week that ICE agents have killed someone who — by their own admission — was not the subject of their operation," she wrote, referencing the earlier fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo during an ICE operation in Houston. She added that Guerrero's killing "was witnessed by his three-year-old daughter" in her Bluey pajamas — a detail clearly chosen for maximum emotional weight.
Harris's characterization of both incidents as unjustified is her conclusion, not a finding. Both remain under active federal investigation.
The Department of Homeland Security offered a more clinical account. "The vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon," DHS said in a statement. Guerrero was described by DHS as an "illegal alien." Advocates from Presente! Maine, a Portland-based aid organization, countered that Guerrero was authorized to work in the United States and had been issued a Social Security number. Work authorization, if accurate, doesn't address the question at the center of this shooting: why the vehicle accelerated toward a federal officer.
What Harris conspicuously did not mention was the environment her own policies helped create. As the New York Post reported, attacks on ICE agents have surged 1,347 percent as of the start of 2026. Death threats against ICE personnel are up 8,000 percent. These are the conditions agents operate in every single day — and the reason an officer might reasonably fear for his life when a vehicle accelerates toward him.
Harris also skipped over the fact that she spent four years as vice president presiding over the worst border crisis in modern history. Critics immediately pointed out that if "someone needs to be investigated," it might be the two people who opened the southern border and then walked away from the wreckage.
Tom Homan, Trump's border czar, noted that Democrats had been holding up $120 million in the DHS budget earmarked for body cameras — the very cameras Harris and her allies are now demanding agents wear. Since the passage of the Big Beautiful Bill, Homan said, those cameras have been ordered and a deployment schedule is on the books. So the accountability Harris is demanding was delayed by her own party.
ICE has since paused most vehicle stops nationwide while the DHS Inspector General investigates the Biddeford shooting. What's not reasonable — not then, not now — is a former vice president who oversaw record border crossings positioning herself as the moral authority on immigration enforcement.
Harris called the shooting evidence that "this cannot be acceptable in America." She's right about that much. An agent shouldn't have to choose between his life and a media firestorm. A three-year-old shouldn't be in a car during an encounter with federal law enforcement. And a foreign national shouldn't be in a position to try to run over American officers in the first place.
The investigation will determine whether the agent followed protocol. That's how accountability works — through evidence, not press releases. Harris already has her verdict. The facts, as usual, are still catching up.