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When David Brouillette told one of his former wives that he shot a man while working as an immigration officer in Maine, she was caught off guard, but not surprised.
“I was shocked, but I wasn’t shocked,” Ashley Brouillette told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Monday. Another former wife, Lucinda Brouillette, was more explicit. When asked whether she believed her ex-husband was capable of “this level of extreme violence,” her answer was “unequivocally yes” in a message shared with reporters on Saturday.
Both women had previously sought orders of protection from Brouillette, and alleged threatening or abusive behavior, according to court documents obtained by news outlets. Lucinda Brouillette said she had warned authorities for years about his aggression. Ashley Brouillette described severe physical and emotional abuse during their marriage. David Brouillette has not responded publicly to the abuse allegations.
Recent research by the American Psychological Association found that a history of domestic violence among law enforcement recruits is correlated with higher rates of misconduct and use-of-force complaints. Those warnings and court filings from Brouillette’s former wives did not prevent him from repeatedly finding work in the field, including short stints as a correctional officer at a Maine prison and as a Veterans Affairs police officer, according to The Associated Press, before eventually landing at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. After about eight months as an agent there, he encountered Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero.
Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old from Colombia with legal authorization to work in the U.S., wasn’t the man agents were looking for in Biddeford, Maine, on the morning of July 13. The agents still attempted to stop his white Kia sedan. Many details about the shooting remain unclear, but according to the Department of Homeland Security, an agent, now known to be Brouillette, opened fire when the vehicle “attempted to flee the scene.”
The decision to open fire, and the public outrage that followed, has placed renewed scrutiny on ICE hiring, vetting and training practices. Brouillette’s family said he told them that his ICE training was just 42 days long — down from a previous standard of 72 days. Records obtained by The Washington Post earlier this year demonstrate that those reductions led to cuts to training on the use of force. DHS has since returned to the 72-day standard, but a large cohort of officers in the field received the shorter training.
That expedited training schedule was part of a broader push to more than double the number of agents from 10,000 to 22,000 in a matter of months to speed up the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda.
This hiring spree has also raised questions about vetting. One current ICE officer told the Washington Examiner that there are many teams on the street “filled with officers who haven’t even cleared background and don’t have a security clearance.”
Earlier this year, The Associated Press also found that officers were being hired before passing background checks. It’s nearly impossible to probe ICE hires systematically, since unlike most state and local law enforcement agencies, DHS shields officer identities to protect them from harassment. But after looking into the backgrounds of 40 officers they could identify, the AP found three had “faced lawsuits that alleged misconduct in prior law enforcement jobs.”
The risks of hiring officers with records of misconduct at prior agencies are well-known in the policing field, and predate ICE’s hiring binge. For years, researchers have studied what happens when officers leave one law enforcement agency after misconduct, disciplinary problems, or other warning signs, only to find another department willing to hire them. They are sometimes referred to as “wandering officers.”
Brouillette himself does not fit the strict definition of the term. There is no evidence that he was under investigation or fired from his previous law enforcement jobs for misconduct. But his short stints through several public safety roles are similar to the kind of pattern that experts track when looking at wandering officers.
Ben Grunwald, a professor of law at Duke University and author of several studies on wandering police officers, told the outlet Investigate West this week that when officers have moved around several departments in a short timeframe — even if they haven’t been fired — it’s potentially a red flag.
Grunwald’s research found that officers who move around are more likely to be fired from subsequent jobs and more likely to receive misconduct complaints than other officers.
The professor was speaking to the outlet not about ICE, but about their investigative finding that in Washington state, wandering officers land disproportionately at tribal police departments, largely because they are more remote and less resourced than other agencies that can afford to spend more on background checks and offer higher salaries to attract a larger hiring pool.
It’s not just tribal police, but small departments in general that face this challenge. In North Carolina, representatives from several small departments told WRAL that sometimes they don’t have the time or expertise to conduct the same background checks as larger agencies. Law professor Jeff Welty, with the University of North Carolina, told the news station that some of these departments are “under so much pressure to kind of complete their staffing with such a small number of interested applicants that they're willing to take a chance on an officer that a larger agency might not.”
ICE’s hiring push may be adding another strain to that same tight labor market that incentivizes departments to hire wandering officers. Some law enforcement officials told The Marshall Project last year that their officers had received marketing from DHS attempting to poach them for immigration work.
Between 2020 and 2022, more than a dozen states passed laws aimed at addressing the wandering officer phenomenon. Mostly, they beefed up requirements for officers to disclose previous discipline, for hiring departments to more thoroughly search for officers’ history, and for the creation of databases to track officer certification and discipline. These efforts have had uneven impacts, however. In Massachusetts, a 2020 law promised to create a process for decertifying officers who had engaged in misconduct. A recent investigation by WCVB identified more than 50 officers across the state still working in law enforcement after leaving previous jobs while facing investigations or discipline — in some cases before those proceedings could reach a conclusion.
In New York, a 2021 law strips officers of their training certificates if they are fired for misconduct or if they quit or retire amid misconduct allegations. But a May investigation by Central Current and USA Today found that officers can sometimes slip through a loophole, whereby those barred from one class of law enforcement work can still technically qualify for law enforcement jobs with a different classification under state law.