AUGUSTA, Maine — 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.
Brouillette’s troubling past further challenges how thoroughly the Department of Homeland Security has vetted recruits as it went on a hiring spree to help carry out President Trump’s immigration crackdown.
At least 10 people have died in encounters with immigration agents since Trump launched the crackdown after retaking office, including 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian national who was shot and killed by Brouillette on Monday while in his car near his home in the coastal Maine city of Biddeford.
DHS, which hasn’t released the name of the officer who killed Durán Guerrero, has said the “vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon.”
Brouillette didn’t respond to text messages or an email seeking comment. Three relatives who said they had spoken to him since the shooting, including an ex-wife and daughter, said he told them he acted in self-defense.
When reached for comment about Brouillette’s record and his role in Monday’s shooting, ICE spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement that “[w]e will never confirm or deny attempts to dox our law enforcement officers,” and that “[t]he ICE officer in question has nearly a decade of federal law enforcement experience with required training including use of force training.”
The White House referred all questions about the shooting and Brouillette to ICE.
A new career in ICE
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.
Ashley Brouillette told the AP that she spoke to her ex-husband in a Facebook audio call, and he acknowledged that he had killed Durán Guerrero. Their 18-year-old daughter, Madison Brouillette, also told the AP that her father called her Wednesday and said that he shot and killed Durán Guerrero.
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.
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 that a judge granted in 2021.
In court filings, David Brouillette said that his second ex-wife had slandered him.
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’d 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.
A military deployment and law enforcement aspirations
Growing up in Gardiner, a city of about 6,000 people roughly 60 miles northeast of Biddeford, where Monday’s shooting occurred, David Brouillette was enchanted by law enforcement and the military, his relatives said.
High school yearbook photos show he was a member of the school’s Naval Junior ROTC, and he wrote that he planned to go to college and become a police officer.
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.
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.”
Life after the Army
After his discharge, Brouillette held a hodgepodge of jobs — some in or adjacent to law enforcement — and was injured in an accident while training to become a firefighter, public records and court documents show.
Brouillette worked for the Maine Correctional Center — a medium-security prison — and for the state’s Health and Human Services Department, spending less than a year at each.
In 2019, court documents show, he was a police officer at a Department of Veterans Affairs medical center near the state capital, Augusta. A Veterans Affairs department spokesperson on Thursday referred questions about Brouillette’s employment to DHS.
But by the end of 2021, he wrote in a text message included in court filings, he was broke, going to school full time and making money delivering food for DoorDash.
Brouillette was enrolled in a firefighting program at Southern Maine Community College and was struck in the head by a steel beam while unloading a trailer at a training facility, according to a lawsuit he filed over his injury.
He sustained a concussion and post-concussive syndrome, with symptoms including impaired memory, cognitive deficits, headaches, vertigo and light sensitivity, and was unable to complete the program, according to the lawsuit, which was settled out of court.
In recent years, court filings show, he was collecting disability pay through the VA. He also drove a truck but quit in January 2025, citing health issues.
In March 2025, Brouillette passed an exam to become a real estate sales agent. His license was active until December. In a Facebook post, Realty of Maine announced Brouillette would be working in the firm’s Bangor office.
“David lives in Maine after retiring from the United States Army,” said the post, which has since been deleted. Brouillette is no longer listed as an agent on the firm’s website. Messages seeking comment were left for Realty of Maine.
In March, the Maine agency that handles child support matters filed a lien against him, public records show. The filing suggests that Brouillette may have been in line for a permanent impairment or disability settlement.
‘I don’t think he sees himself as a killer’
In late 2025, around the time he joined ICE, his ex-wife Ashley said he left a three-minute voicemail mocking her for taking out a restraining order against him. According to the message she shared with the AP, he repeatedly called her “disgusting” and suggested that she and the other women and girls in her “bloodline” should die.
“And all of you should have your f— throats cut,” the voicemail said. “Yeah, you should. Am I threatening that I’m gonna do that? Nope. Nope. But do I think that you should have your f— throats cuts? Or should have had them cut? Yep.”
She said she broke off contact with him until Wednesday, when his picture began circulating online.
Ashley Brouillette reached out to his current wife on Facebook and they spoke on the phone for several minutes. Her ex-husband spoke with her, according to cellphone screenshots of the phone exchange she shared with the AP. He acknowledged he had fatally shot Durán Guerrero.
“He was asking if I could tell them that he was a good person and not to talk about the abuse and stuff that I had endured while with him and he said that the most important thing is his character right now,” she said.
She said he told her he is now hiding in protective custody.
“I asked him why he did it,” she said. “He said it was a justified shooting. The guy was trying to run him over with a car.”
His daughter also said he told her it was justified.
“I don’t think he sees himself as a killer,” Madison Brouillette said.
“I think he thinks that he genuinely did the right thing,” she added. “All he said was that he did what he had to do. He said that he had to protect himself.”
Brook, Sisak, Swinhart and Galofaro write for the Associated Press. AP reporter Will Weissert contributed to this report.
ICE officer in Maine shooting has history of terrifying, violent behavior, family and records say
AUGUSTA, Maine — 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.
Brouillette’s troubling past further challenges how thoroughly the Department of Homeland Security has vetted recruits as it went on a hiring spree to help carry out President Trump’s immigration crackdown.
At least 10 people have died in encounters with immigration agents since Trump launched the crackdown after retaking office, including 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian national who was shot and killed by Brouillette on Monday while in his car near his home in the coastal Maine city of Biddeford.
DHS, which hasn’t released the name of the officer who killed Durán Guerrero, has said the “vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon.”
Brouillette didn’t respond to text messages or an email seeking comment. Three relatives who said they had spoken to him since the shooting, including an ex-wife and daughter, said he told them he acted in self-defense.
When reached for comment about Brouillette’s record and his role in Monday’s shooting, ICE spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement that “[w]e will never confirm or deny attempts to dox our law enforcement officers,” and that “[t]he ICE officer in question has nearly a decade of federal law enforcement experience with required training including use of force training.”
The White House referred all questions about the shooting and Brouillette to ICE.
A new career in ICE
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.
Ashley Brouillette told the AP that she spoke to her ex-husband in a Facebook audio call, and he acknowledged that he had killed Durán Guerrero. Their 18-year-old daughter, Madison Brouillette, also told the AP that her father called her Wednesday and said that he shot and killed Durán Guerrero.
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.
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 that a judge granted in 2021.
In court filings, David Brouillette said that his second ex-wife had slandered him.
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’d 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.
A military deployment and law enforcement aspirations
Growing up in Gardiner, a city of about 6,000 people roughly 60 miles northeast of Biddeford, where Monday’s shooting occurred, David Brouillette was enchanted by law enforcement and the military, his relatives said.
High school yearbook photos show he was a member of the school’s Naval Junior ROTC, and he wrote that he planned to go to college and become a police officer.
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.
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.”
Life after the Army
After his discharge, Brouillette held a hodgepodge of jobs — some in or adjacent to law enforcement — and was injured in an accident while training to become a firefighter, public records and court documents show.
Brouillette worked for the Maine Correctional Center — a medium-security prison — and for the state’s Health and Human Services Department, spending less than a year at each.
In 2019, court documents show, he was a police officer at a Department of Veterans Affairs medical center near the state capital, Augusta. A Veterans Affairs department spokesperson on Thursday referred questions about Brouillette’s employment to DHS.
But by the end of 2021, he wrote in a text message included in court filings, he was broke, going to school full time and making money delivering food for DoorDash.
Brouillette was enrolled in a firefighting program at Southern Maine Community College and was struck in the head by a steel beam while unloading a trailer at a training facility, according to a lawsuit he filed over his injury.
He sustained a concussion and post-concussive syndrome, with symptoms including impaired memory, cognitive deficits, headaches, vertigo and light sensitivity, and was unable to complete the program, according to the lawsuit, which was settled out of court.
In recent years, court filings show, he was collecting disability pay through the VA. He also drove a truck but quit in January 2025, citing health issues.
In March 2025, Brouillette passed an exam to become a real estate sales agent. His license was active until December. In a Facebook post, Realty of Maine announced Brouillette would be working in the firm’s Bangor office.
“David lives in Maine after retiring from the United States Army,” said the post, which has since been deleted. Brouillette is no longer listed as an agent on the firm’s website. Messages seeking comment were left for Realty of Maine.
In March, the Maine agency that handles child support matters filed a lien against him, public records show. The filing suggests that Brouillette may have been in line for a permanent impairment or disability settlement.
‘I don’t think he sees himself as a killer’
In late 2025, around the time he joined ICE, his ex-wife Ashley said he left a three-minute voicemail mocking her for taking out a restraining order against him. According to the message she shared with the AP, he repeatedly called her “disgusting” and suggested that she and the other women and girls in her “bloodline” should die.
“And all of you should have your f— throats cut,” the voicemail said. “Yeah, you should. Am I threatening that I’m gonna do that? Nope. Nope. But do I think that you should have your f— throats cuts? Or should have had them cut? Yep.”
She said she broke off contact with him until Wednesday, when his picture began circulating online.
Ashley Brouillette reached out to his current wife on Facebook and they spoke on the phone for several minutes. Her ex-husband spoke with her, according to cellphone screenshots of the phone exchange she shared with the AP. He acknowledged he had fatally shot Durán Guerrero.
“He was asking if I could tell them that he was a good person and not to talk about the abuse and stuff that I had endured while with him and he said that the most important thing is his character right now,” she said.
She said he told her he is now hiding in protective custody.
“I asked him why he did it,” she said. “He said it was a justified shooting. The guy was trying to run him over with a car.”
His daughter also said he told her it was justified.
“I don’t think he sees himself as a killer,” Madison Brouillette said.
“I think he thinks that he genuinely did the right thing,” she added. “All he said was that he did what he had to do. He said that he had to protect himself.”
Brook, Sisak, Swinhart and Galofaro write for the Associated Press. AP reporter Will Weissert contributed to this report.
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Woman at center of sprawling Minnesota fraud case gets nearly 42-year prison sentence
MINNEAPOLIS — A judge on Thursday handed down an extraordinary prison sentence — nearly 42 years — to the former leader of a Minnesota nonprofit who was convicted in a staggering $250-million fraud case that helped ignite an immigration crackdown by the Trump administration.
Aimee Bock ran Feeding Our Future, which had claimed it helped provide millions of meals to children in need during the pandemic. The U.S. Justice Department, however, said she was atop the “single largest COVID-19 fraud scheme in the country.”
“I understand I failed. I failed the public, my family, everyone,” Bock said in federal court.
President Trump used the fraud cases against Bock and many others to initially justify a massive surge of federal officers to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area last winter, leading to a pushback by residents and the deaths of two people.
“Feeding Our Future operated like a cash pipeline, open to anyone willing to submit fraudulent claims and pay kickbacks,” prosecutors said in a court filing.
Bock had long proclaimed her innocence but was convicted last year of conspiracy, fraud and bribery.
“This case has changed our state forever,” Joe Thompson, formerly the lead prosecutor in the case, said outside the courtroom. “Aimee Bock did everything she could to earn this long sentence.”
The nonprofit sat atop a fraud network that included a web of partner organizations, phony distribution sites, kickbacks and fake lists of children supposedly being fed, prosecutors say. Dozens of people, many from the state’s large Somali community, have been convicted in a series of overlapping food fraud cases that have spent years in the courts.
Bock and co-conspirators enriched themselves with international travel, real estate purchases, luxury vehicles and other lavish spending, the government said.
Bock’s lawyer, Kenneth Udoibok, argued for no more than three years in prison, saying she had provided key information to investigators. He argued that Bock had been unfairly painted as the mastermind and insisted that two co-defendants were responsible for running the scams.
Meanwhile, authorities this week filed additional charges against others in a sprawling investigation into federal social service spending in Minnesota.
The targets include Fahima Mahamud, who was CEO of Future Leaders Early Learning Center, a childcare center in Minneapolis. Over three years, Mahamud’s organization was reimbursed approximately $4.6 million for services on behalf of people who didn’t make a required copayment, prosecutors allege.
A message seeking comment from her lawyer was not immediately returned Thursday. Mahamud was charged separately in February with fraud related to meals. She has pleaded not guilty.
Two other people were charged with conspiring to get $975,000 in Medicaid subsidies for housing services that were not provided. They’re expected to plead guilty in June, according to a court filing.
Two additional people were accused of receiving $21.1 million by billing Medicaid for autism therapy that was either unnecessary or not provided. Investigators said the two paid families as much as $1,500 per child per month to add their names to the program and get reimbursement.
Trump, who has long derided Somalis, last year blasted the state as “a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity.” He also criticized the leadership of Gov. Tim Walz, the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee in the 2024 election.
“Somali gangs are terrorizing the people of that great State, and BILLIONS of Dollars are missing. Send them back to where they came from,” Trump wrote on social media.
Bock is white and the U.S. Attorney’s Office says the overwhelming majority of defendants in the cases are of Somali descent. Most are U.S. citizens.
The immigration surge led to repeated protests and confrontations between residents and federal officers and resulted in the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Sullivan writes for the Associated Press.
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Justice Department seeks the names of 2020 election workers in Georgia’s Fulton County
ATLANTA — The Department of Justice is seeking the names of every person who worked in the 2020 election in Georgia’s Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold that Donald Trump has long accused of widespread voter fraud he falsely says cost him victory against Joe Biden in the state that year.
Lawyers for the county filed a motion on Monday night to quash a grand jury subpoena that asks for the names and personal contact information of county employees and volunteer poll workers. This latest action comes after the FBI in January went to a Fulton County elections warehouse and seized ballots and other documents from the 2020 election, which Georgia’s certified totals showed Trump lost in the state to Biden by 11,779 votes out of nearly 5 million cast. Trump, a Republican, still insists the election was stolen from him even though judges and his own attorney general concluded otherwise.
Monday’s court filing says the subpoena is meant to “target, harass and punish the President’s perceived political opponents.” The request is “grossly overbroad and untethered to any reasonable need,” the county’s lawyers argue. It “cannot yield any evidence that could result in a criminal prosecution,” they wrote, arguing that the statute of limitations on any federal crime related to the 2020 election has already expired.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment Tuesday.
County Board of Commissioners Chairman Robb Pitts, in an emailed statement, called the subpoena “yet another act of outrageous federal overreach designed to intimidate and chill participation in elections.”
“Let me be crystal clear. Fulton County will not be intimidated,” said Pitts, a Democrat who’s running for reelection.
Since the 2020 election, Trump “has obsessively propagated the debunked conspiracy theory that Fulton County ‘stole’ the 2020 election from him,” the county’s lawyers wrote. “And he has made it clear that he seeks retribution against those who refuse to indulge his baseless claims.”
Trump has already targeted individual poll workers like Ruby Freeman, who was attacked by him and his supporters after the election. Freeman, who’s Black, has said she was forced to flee her home after false claims of election fraud against her led to racist threats and strangers showing up at her home.
The grand jury subpoena, dated April 17, was served on the county’s director of elections on April 20, the county’s court filing says. It seeks the “name, position/function, residential and email addresses, and personal telephone number(s)” for thousands of election workers “ranging from county employees who assisted on election day, to bus drivers who operated a mobile voting location, to volunteers and temporary poll workers,” the filing says.
The subpoena “is a chilling escalation in the campaign to terrorize Fulton County election workers,” the county’s lawyers wrote, adding that threats arising from the current political environment have caused election workers to “fear for their physical safety.” That and other stresses “including the likelihood of being scapegoated by public officials” are causing election workers to leave their jobs “in unprecedented numbers,” they wrote.
The county’s lawyers note that the subpoena directs the county to provide the records not to the grand jury but to an out-of-state Justice Department lawyer or to the FBI agent who wrote the affidavit used for the seizure of the county’s 2020 ballots in January.
The January seizure of the ballots and other records from Fulton County was one in a string of moves by Trump’s administration to obtain past election records from critical swing states. The FBI in March used a subpoena to get records related to an audit of the 2020 presidential election in Maricopa County in Arizona. And the Justice Department in April demanded that Michigan’s Wayne County turn over its ballots from the 2024 election, which Trump won against Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris.
The Justice Department is also fighting numerous states in court for access to voter data that includes sensitive personal information. Election officials, including some Republicans, have said handing over the information would violate state and federal privacy laws.
Brumback writes for the Associated Press.
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