Dawn Baca

Trump and Stephen Miller's Nazification of America Has a Body Count — Call It What It Is: Pure Hate David Brouillette wrote the verdict four years before he pulled the trigger. He looked at his own sister's partner — a Colombian man living legally in the country, studying, raising children with her — and saw contamination. He called him a non-citizen who should drag his ass back to his third-world country and enjoy the luxuries there. He dismissed the man's bloodline as something that could never understand what it means to earn or cherish American freedom. He told his sister she was dead to him for choosing that man. This was not a bureaucratic complaint about paperwork. It was the old, raw calculus of race: some blood belongs, some blood does not, and the ones who do not must be pushed out before they sit at the table. That is the same logic that hardened into law and street violence in 1938 Germany. Define the outsider by ancestry. Declare their presence an offense against the nation. Empower the men who already believe it in their marrow. Then treat whatever follows as the necessary price of purity. On a July morning in Biddeford, Maine, Brouillette opened fire on Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. The Colombian father was leaving home for work. He was not the person ICE had come for. He had work authorization, a young daughter, a partner, no final removal order. Multiple rounds hit him in the face and neck. His car was later rammed. He was dragged out and handcuffed after the shots, in front of the people who loved him. The official line was that a vehicle tried to flee and public safety required deadly force. His own family says the agent admitted what he had done and asked them to cover for him. The man who fired those shots carried a long trail of warning signs: allegations of violence against the women in his life, protective orders, a childhood diagnosis of severe bipolar disorder with hospitalizations, PTSD, a head injury that left him impaired, earlier racist talk, local police departments that refused to hire him because the red flags were too loud. ICE took him anyway. The post-election hiring surge needed bodies. Training was shortened or bypassed. Background review lagged. A man who had already written that a Colombian's bloodline had no place in America was handed a badge and a gun and sent to enforce immigration law. This is not a tragic accident of enforcement. It is the result of a political project that treats certain immigrants as an invasive force whose blood itself is the problem, that floods the streets with agents under lowered standards, and that accepts dead fathers as the cost of keeping the table pure. Guerrero's daughter is three. The pavement where he died is now a memorial of flowers and candles. Brouillette's emails are the motive in his own handwriting. When a government arms men who talk about foreign bloodlines as unworthy and then calls the bodies collateral, it is running the same machinery that powered the racial hate that consumed Germany in 1938: identify the contaminant, empower the enforcers who already hate them, and treat the violence that follows as order restored.