BostonGlobe.com32%
Ex-wives of ICE agent tied to Maine shooting accuse him of violence and threats 78%
By Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio67% Lea Skene60% Mike Damiano0%
7/17/2026, 2:43:06 PM
Topics: Ice, Shootings, Abuse Allegations, Legal Proceedings, Military Service, Law Enforcement Training
Keywords: Ice, Shooting, Maine, Biddeford, Domestic Violence, Abuse, Law Enforcement, Training, Hiring, Trump Administration, Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero, David Brouillette, Ashley Brouillette, Protective Order, Custody, Military Veteran, Army National Guard, Afghanistan, Police Officer, Department Of Veterans Affairs, Misogynistic Language, Voicemail, Restraining Order, Court Records, Guardian Ad Litem, Scott Collins, Facebook, John Sandweg, Kristi Noem, Markwayne Mullin, Congress, Associated Press, Alex Pretti, Renee Nicole Good, Kennebec Journal, Young Marines, Iraq War, Tal Kopan, Emma Platoff, Nick Stoico, Camilo Fonseca
BS Summary: This article contains 27 faulty reasoning types, including Anecdotal, Confirmation Bias, and Post Hoc (False Cause), with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 25.1% saturation with 305 hits. Analysis detected 2,197 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,216 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 70.1% and a BS Rank of 78% (3,910 of 17,127 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 77.20% of the article peer group.
David Brouillette, identified by family members as the ICE agent who shot and killed a Colombian immigrant in Maine this week, was accused by two ex-wives of violent and threatening behavior.
On Thursday, one of the women filed a court document alleging Brouillette once threatened to kill her with a gun.
The other, Ashley Brouillette, said in an interview with the Globe that he had choked her, slammed her to the floor, and once threw boiling water on her.
Both allegations were made amid messy divorce proceedings in which Brouillette also accused each woman of domestic abuse.
Attempts to reach David Brouillette Thursday and Friday were unsuccessful.
Federal officials have not publicly identified Brouillette as the shooter.
But Ashley Brouillette, who was married to him from 2007 to 2009, said she spoke to him on Wednesday and that acknowledged his role in the shooting.
“He kept saying it was justified,” she said.
The Portland Press-Herald also identified Brouillette as the shooter.
The revelations about Brouillette’s past come amid an outcry over the killing of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford on Monday.
It is the latest fatal shooting by federal immigration officials agents since the Trump administration deployed thousands of new ICE agents as part of its nationwide immigration crackdown; just six days earlier, in Texas, another immigrant was shot and killed in his truck during a traffic stop by ICE agents.
He too was reportedly not the intended target of their attempted stop.
The shootings have renewed criticism that ICE has hired unqualified applicants in its rush to staff up for Trump’s crackdown.
Many law enforcement experts also question the training provided to agents, saying their behavior during traffic stops violates widely-accepted police procedures.
Durán Guerrero was shot Monday while he was behind the wheel of a car outside his family’s apartment.
Authorities have said little about the circumstances of the shooting and many key details remain elusive.
For one, it’s unclear why agents encountered Durán Guerrero in the first place, as they were targeting someone else with a deportation order, officials have said.
According to the Trump administration, ICE agents tried to conduct a traffic stop after “an illegal alien departed the residence in a vehicle.”
An officer discharged his weapon, “fearing for public safety” when the driver didn’t stop, according to a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson.
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesperson said the officer “in question has nearly a decade of federal law enforcement experience with required training.”
The Associated Press reported that Brouillette joined ICE in late 2025.
Brouillette’s second ex-wife, from whom he was divorced in 2019, returned to court on Thursday to request a protective order, citing his involvement in the Biddeford shooting.
In the request, she checked a box indicating she and the 11-year-old daughter she shares with Brouillette were in “immediate and present danger of abuse by the defendant.”
She said Brouillette owns a gun and a “bow or crossbow” and keeps the weapons “at his home.”
One question on the court form asked if the defendant ever used a firearm or other weapon in an “intimidating, threatening, or abusive way.”
She checked yes and wrote: “Many years ago Dave has threatened my life w/ his gun.”
She wrote that she sought the protection order because Brouillette was involved “in a highly publicized ... matter involving allegations of a shooting in Biddeford ME, on Monday.”
She asked the court to bar him from contacting her or her daughter and requested sole custody of their daughter.
The parents now share custody 50-50, according to the request.
“Dave contacting [their daughter] is exposing her to more damage and possible physical harm — a stress she should not bear at 11 years old,” the woman wrote.
“My concern is for her physical safety and emotional wellbeing during this intense, high stress process,” she wrote.
A Maine judge denied her request, ruling the allegations were “insufficient to support a finding” that Brouillette posed an “immediate and present danger.”
Brouillette and the woman previously filed numerous competing applications for protective orders against each other over the course of several years.
Many included multiple accusations of serious abuse.
Most of the orders were granted temporarily.
The Globe isn’t naming the woman because attempts to contact her were unsuccessful.
In another application, in January 2020, the woman said Brouillette had become “very erratic with his behavior — and has become severely obsessive,” phoning her nearly 200 times in two days.
About a year later, she wrote that his oldest daughter returns from her weekend visits with him “in tears because of the emotional and mental and verbal abuse he inflicts on her.”
He dumped an entire plate of spaghetti on her hair, and when the daughter asked him to stop, “he tackled her,” the woman wrote."
Brouillette, 37, is a military veteran who held a number of jobs in recent years, including as a police officer for the Department of Veterans Affairs.
He had multiple positions in the Maine Army National Guard and the regular US Army, and was then deployed to Afghanistan from May 2012 to February 2013, leaving the Army as a sergeant in December 2015.
Brouillette’s background “certainly raises serious questions,” said John Sandweg, who led ICE as acting director in 2013.
He said it would be “incredibly rare” for someone with that history to be deemed suitable for federal law enforcement.
“I would hope that in my day, those are the kind of things that would have been discovered,” he said.
Amid its hiring surge, ICE changed its recruiting and training procedures, lowering its age requirements, offered signing bonuses, and roughly halved training time to 47 days, a number picked because President Trump is the 47th president, according to press accounts and whistleblower reports.
Training procedures are even more abbreviated if a new recruit is considered to be a prior law enforcement officer.
DHS argued its training has not suffered, however, and that it was “streamlined” to “cut redundancy.”
But anecdotal accounts and press reporting of minimal vetting and training abounded.
An Associated Press investigation found many new employees with questionable qualifications.
The fatal ICE shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good earlier this year was one of the factors that contributed to the firing of Kristi Noem as Homeland Security secretary, replaced by former US Senate Markwayne Mullin.
In June, Mullin told Congress training procedures would be updated and new training would be added, including for high-risk vehicle stops.
Sandweg, the former acting director, noted that amid the hiring surge, ICE agency may have struggled to maintain high standards.
“They have cut major corners in all of that,” Sandweg said.
Brouillette was interested in law enforcement and the military from a young age.
In 2003, he was quoted in the Kennebec Journal as a member of the Kennebec Valley Young Marines color guard, which was marching in a local Fourth of July parade.
Brouillette, then 14, told the newspaper it was an important time to participate because of the ongoing war in Iraq.
“We’re representing America,” he said.
<i>Tal Kopan, Emma Platoff, Nick Stoico and Camilo Fonseca of the Globe Staff contributed to this report.
Material from the Associated Press was also used.</i>
Analysis
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