When the Trump administration announced it was lowering hiring standards and shortening the length of training for Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers so that the agency could have more warm bodies to aid in President Donald Trump’s racist mass deportation efforts, experts warned that the changes could have deadly consequences.
Sadly, those experts’ warnings are proving to be correct.
The Associated Press on Thursday night reported that close relatives to David Brouillette—the ICE agent who shot and killed a 25-year-old Colombian immigrant in Maine—describe him as a violent and mentally unstable man who should never have been given access to a gun or power.
According to the report, family members accused Brouillette “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.”
Brouillette’s ex-wife, Ashley Brouillette, told the AP that he had been violent toward her, including one incident in which he threw boiling water at her while holding the couple’s daughter. She added that when he told her he was hired by ICE, she didn’t believe him because he had a history of psychiatric issues and she thought he was experiencing a mental health crisis.
Brouillette’s reported violent history could easily have been found if ICE had done a comprehensive background check.
According to the AP, Brouillette’s violent conduct was detailed in “hundreds of family court records,” which accused Brouillette of stalking, harassment, and physical and verbal abuse. Another relative told AP that Brouillette had been also diagnosed with “severe bipolar disorder,” had been hospitalized multiple times, and twice attempted suicide.
What’s more, Ashley Brouillette told the Portland Press Herald that she had personally warned her ex-husband’s previous superiors in the military of his issues, yet he had remained on the job.
But ICE was so desperate to deport people of color that they hired a man like Brouillette, who, according to both the AP and Portland Press Herald, admitted to his ex-wife and daughter that he was the officer who shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, the Colombian immigrant who was legally in the United States. Reportedly, he even asked them to lie about what happened.
“He was asking me to lie for him and to cover for his character,” Ashley Brouillette told the Portland Press Herald. “I told him that I was not going to lie for him. And then he tried to say that it was a justified shooting because the guy tried to hit him with his car.”
You’d think that ICE would express concern that someone with Brouillette’s history of violence and mental instability was somehow able to become an officer and then execute someone.
Instead, the Trump administration has refused to confirm Brouillette’s identity. When the Portland Press Herald told the Department of Homeland Security—which oversees ICE—that they knew the killer was Brouillette, DHS actually lauded him, saying that the officer “in question has nearly a decade of federal law enforcement experience with required training.”
Brouillette is just one of several new hires who would not have passed a background check had a legitimate one been conducted.
A Guardian report from April found numerous new agents had blemishes on their records—including lying in police reports—yet were hired anyway.
“If vetting is not done well and it’s done too quickly, you have higher risk of increased liability to the agency because of bad actions, abuse of power and the lack of ability to properly carry out the mission because people don’t know what they are doing,” Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former ICE official who served under former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden as well as in Trump’s first term, told The Guardian.
Sadly, Trickler-McNulty’s comment have proven to be true.
The Trump administration officials who demanded a lightning-fast acceleration in hiring to carry out an evil deportation agenda have blood on their hands.
Posted with permission from Daily Kos.
