Sign up to receive our newsletter

Dear Neighbors,

We write to you in grief.

Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero spent his mornings cleaning a veterinarian's office and his afternoons delivering food, sometimes with his three-year-old daughter riding along. He came to Maine from Bucaramanga, Colombia, to build a future for her. He was 25 years old. On the morning of July 13, as he drove through his own neighborhood in Biddeford, an ICE agent shot and killed him.

Speculating about whether the worst will happen is over. The worst has happened. A Maine father was brutally taken from his family, and from his friends and neighbors. His partner knelt beside him in the street. His daughter will grow up without her father.

In March, we wrote that Maine faces a choice between fear and community safety. We described what happens when armed agents can take people from our streets without cause: workers vanish from job sites, families skip the grocery store, children watch classmates disappear from school. We warned that governing through fear makes no one safe. We take no comfort in having been right. We only wish, with everything we have, that we had been wrong.

We also wrote about who Mainers are when it matters, and this week Mainers showed us again. Within hours, neighbors created a memorial with flowers, candles, and handwritten signs. Hundreds gathered for marches and vigils in Biddeford, Portland, Scarborough, Lewiston, Bangor, and towns across the state. Municipal leaders and legislators across the state are demanding a full and transparent investigation, and we join them. Johan's family deserves the truth, and they deserve accountability. So does every family in Maine now living with the knowledge that this happened here.

The history of this land, and of Maine, includes a long inheritance of removing people from their homes by violent force. Colonization and enslavement; the expulsion of the Acadians; the destruction of Black communities like Malaga Island; the taking of Indigenous children from their families; the internment of Japanese Americans. Each time, the violence was carried out under the authority of law, and the official story said it was necessary.

But that's not our only inheritance. When the federal government demanded that Maine help capture people fleeing enslavement, Maine refused. That refusal was not automatic. It was a choice, made by people who saw the machinery of violence and chose to disrupt it. We are being called to make that choice again. Safety is neighbors who show up as legal observers, hotline operators, people picking up groceries or helping cover rent for a family in crisis, a community that holds its people close. Every one of us can be part of that story.

Hold Johan's family in your heart. Then act to protect our neighbors.

Visit the LighthouseME Immigrant Defense Hub for rapid response resources, know-your-rights information, and ways to support impacted families. To donate to coalition partners, legal aid, and mutual aid programs, visit lighthouseme.org/get-involved.

In Solidarity,
Bruce King, Maulian Bryant, and Amanda Comeau, Co-Chairs