When an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed a 25-year-old Colombian man in Biddeford, Maine, on July 13, the Trump administration offered a simple explanation for why no video captured the encounter: the agents were not wearing body cameras. That account is now in question.
According to reporting by The Intercept, four ICE officials who reviewed images from the scene identified body cameras among the equipment worn by officers in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. The devices, the officials said, are multi-function accessories that ICE uses primarily as radio microphones, with the camera function disabled.
The distinction matters because Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin reportedly told Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, that officers involved in the shooting were not wearing body cameras at all. Speaking to Maine reporters, King said flatly, “Body cameras were not on the agents. So we have no video evidence of what occurred in this case.”
The device that can record but doesn’t
The ICE officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their jobs, identified the equipment as Motorola SVX Video Remote Speaker Microphones. As The Intercept reported, the accessory doubles as a wireless radio mic and a body camera, but officers said the camera is not in use. “They have multiple functionalities,” one official said. “However, we are currently only using them as mics because of the AXON contract.”
Homeland Security buys its dedicated body cameras through a separate contract with Axon, the law enforcement technology firm formerly known as Taser. A second officer described a physical cover that clips over the SVX camera lens, saying that because the cameras are not activated, officers simply leave the covers on. The SVX mics are built to store more than 100 hours of standard-definition video internally, but the recording feature requires a subscription that ICE has not activated. ICE, Motorola and Axon did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.
According to a document on the Homeland Security website cited in the reporting, ICE expects to spend more than $100 million over six years on Motorola’s line of smart radios and accessories, a category that includes the SVX mic.
A “priority” that outran practice
The Biddeford killing has drawn scrutiny in part because ICE has publicly framed body cameras as a goal for well over a year. As the Bangor Daily News reported, the agent who shot and killed the 25-year-old did not record footage, 18 months after ICE issued a directive calling body-camera deployment a “top priority.” The man, identified by immigrant rights groups and Colombian officials as Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, was shot while his young daughter sat in the back seat of his car, and King’s office has said he was not the intended target of the operation.
His death came days after another fatal ICE shooting, that of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, and months after the killings of two people by federal agents in Minnesota. Neither Durán Guerrero nor Salgado Araujo was the intended target of the arrest teams, and neither death was captured by body-worn cameras, according to official reports.
ICE said it will now include a body-camera-equipped member on every arrest team, adding that more than half of its field offices already have the devices and the rest are due within two months. The rollout was funded through a $20 million congressional appropriation. But Maine’s congressional delegation has pressed for faster action and broader oversight. Rep. Jared Golden, a Maine Democrat, called the pace of the rollout “far too slow.” Rep. Chellie Pingree, another Maine Democrat, rejected the agency’s claim that cameras were delayed by government shutdowns, telling the Bangor Daily News, “I don’t buy for one second” that explanation.
King, who said the evidence so far did not show the legal threshold for shooting into a moving vehicle had been met, vowed to keep up the pressure, mentioning public criticism, direct talks with Mullin and possible legislation. Sen. Susan Collins, the delegation’s lone Republican, blamed Democrats for earlier funding fights while acknowledging that the shootings “demand immediate action” and calling for a halt to non-urgent traffic stops. Shortly after the Maine shooting, ICE ordered field officers to halt nearly all traffic stops, though border czar Tom Homan later signaled the vehicle stops would continue.
New rules on cameras and clothing
The deaths, along with a botched arrest, have since prompted ICE to announce new policies. According to a leaked document obtained by The Intercept, the agency’s arm responsible for street arrests issued a nationwide dress code requiring officers to wear “readily identifiable ICE attire” during field operations. The guidance, signed by Acting ICE Director David Venturella, bans jeans, sweatshirts, hoodies, non-collared shirts and clothing with graphics, and it requires that an ICE badge remain visible at the time of arrest.
Officers told The Intercept the change followed a July 13 incident at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, where two plainclothes officers in hooded sweatshirts abandoned an attempted arrest as bystanders recorded video. One officer said a colleague “looked like a kidnapper.” Nick Wilson of the Center for American Progress called the shift “a long-overdue admission that unidentifiable immigration enforcement is dangerous, instills fear, and erodes public trust.”
Together, the disclosures point to a gap between what ICE has said about its own accountability tools and how those tools function in the field. In a case where a man was killed and no video exists, the officials’ account suggests the cameras were physically present but deliberately switched off, a detail that goes to the heart of whether the public will ever learn what happened on that residential street in Biddeford.
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