Maine Governor Janet Mills tried to visit a memorial site for the man killed by an ICE agent. Protesters chased her away.
Mills, a Democrat, was only at the intersection for a few minutes, and left quickly.
“The Governor understands and shares the anger and pain many people feel about the death of Mr. Guerrero,” Anna Parker, a spokesperson for Mills, said in an email to the Globe late Wednesday afternoon.
Parker said the governor has consistently urged Congress and the Trump administration to rein in ICE, and this week she criticized the “reckless and haphazard manner in which immigration enforcement operations are being conducted in Maine and across the country.” Mills visited with local officials in Biddeford Wednesday, Parker said, and she renewed her calls for Congress to reform or abolish ICE.
Guerrero was from Colombia and had come to the United States about three years ago. He had a 3-year-old girl with his wife and lived in Biddeford working multiple jobs.
The Department of Homeland Security said ICE agents were trying to serve a deportation order at a person’s last known address, while Senator Angus King’s office said agents weren’t targeting Guerrero but looking for someone else.
The memorial for Guerrero on the corner of Hill and Pool streets, less than a block from where he lived, had spilled over into the street and across the sidewalk by Wednesday, when Mills came to see it.
But she was largely not welcome there. Instead, she was met with anger from residents who said they had asked their elected leaders to do more to stop ICE from operating in the state, but felt as if no one had listened to them.
After the fatal shooting, Mills said that state law enforcement agencies were working with federal officials to figure out the “facts” of what happened.
Since then, she has taken a stronger stance against ICE. On Wednesday, she sent a letter to Maine’s congressional delegation saying that ICE must be disbanded unless significant operational changes are made.
While speaking to reporters in Biddeford on Wednesday, she said that the situation was “devastating.”
“I wanted to come here and express my condolences to the city, to the community,” Mills said, adding that it was time for Congress to act on measures of accountability and training for immigration enforcement agents. “We’d like to see more aggressive action on the part of Congress to protect the lives of people across this country.”
But it was too late now, some demonstrators told her. A father had already died.
One man threw a pair of plastic handcuffs at Mills’s SUV as it drove away from Guerrero’s memorial site.
“That’s another dead body,” the man said. “Don’t come back up here unless you got results!”
Kelsey Cummings, a Biddeford resident who had been involved in protesting the shooting, followed Mills to her car, holding up a sign toward her. In red paint, Cummings had written: “You ignored us.”
She and others said elected leaders had been absent as ICE detained Maine residents in recent weeks after claiming it had left the state following a surge of enforcement in January. To Cummings, it felt inevitable that federal agents would eventually kill someone, she said.
“How could it not?” Cummings said. “You saw it with Alex Pretti. You saw it with Renee Good.”
Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @giuliamcdnr.
