His name was Joan Sebastian Guerrero.
He was twenty-six years old, a father, a partner, a man from Colombia who came here believing the same quiet promise that has carried people toward this country for generations: that if he worked hard, followed the law, and loved his family well, there might be enough room here for an ordinary life.
He had a Social Security number.
He had legal authorization to work.
There was no warrant with his name on it.
Because he wasn’t the man they were looking for.
It’s impossible to know exactly what Joan Sebastian Guerrero was thinking as he climbed behind the wheel that Monday morning, and I won’t pretend that I do.
But I know what Monday mornings feel like.
I know the peculiar tenderness of a day that hasn’t broken your heart yet. Coffee still warm enough to fog the windshield. Roads filling with people chasing another paycheck, another chance to wrest something durable from an unforgiving world. Parents leaving home with distracted kisses, promising to pick something up on the way home, never imagining those ordinary promises are sacred because they assume, as we all do, that there will be a way home.
Joan Sebastian Guerrero probably believed that too.
He never made it home.
It was somewhere around seven-thirty on a Monday morning in Biddeford, Maine, when one ordinary day split cleanly into a before and an after.
Neighbors would later describe hearing what they first mistook for fireworks, those sharp, splintering cracks that didn’t belong to the softness of a summer morning. One woman, standing at her second-floor window, found herself counting almost without meaning to. One. Then seven more. Eight shots breaking across a town that, only moments earlier, had been waking the way towns always wake, coffee brewing, traffic beginning to gather, another Monday unfolding with the quiet confidence that it would end the way Mondays are supposed to end.
Another witness watched a government SUV ram a small white car. Saw agents in tactical gear crowd the driver’s side door as the vehicle lurched through the intersection in that awful, dreamlike way catastrophe sometimes moves, the mind refusing to recognize what the eyes already know.
Then the windshield burst inward.
Then Joan Sebastian Guerrero was pulled from the car, bleeding from the head.
A neighbor stood close enough to hear the last words he would ever speak.
“I tried to stop.”
Four small words carrying the final, flickering ember of a man’s belief that truth still possessed the power to interrupt violence, that another human being might still see him as a father instead of a threat.
They were the last words his daughter will ever know her father spoke.
She is three years old.
She was still wearing her Bluey pajamas.
Soft cotton.
Sleep still clinging to her.
A little blue cartoon dog stitched across the fabric, a world where every story ends with laughter and nobody stays hurt for long.
She watched federal agents shoot her father to death.
She watched them drag his body onto the pavement.
She watched them close a pair of handcuffs around his wrists after he was already dead.
A neighbor begged them to cover him.
They didn’t.
For hours, Joan Sebastian Guerrero remained where he had fallen, a young father lying beneath the widening July sun and the implacable patience of an indifferent sky, while yellow tape fluttered in the summer air and the little girl who had climbed into that car believing she was simply riding beside her daddy toward another ordinary Monday was already carrying a memory no child should ever have to shoulder.
Before that family had the chance to absorb the impossible fact that he was gone, the machinery of institutional self-preservation was already roaring to life. Not to uncover the truth. To get ahead of it.
Watch what happens every single time. The truth is still tying its shoes while the excuse is already halfway around the block. Before an independent investigation has a chance to separate fact from fiction, the public is handed a tidy little morality play in which the dead somehow end up on trial. Attention drifts away from the people who exercised the power to take a life and settles instead on the person who lost it. The questions change. The standard changes. Accountability begins dissolving before the evidence has even been collected.
These agents weren’t wearing body cameras.
So there are moments from the last minutes of Joan Sebastian Guerrero’s life that may now belong only to the people who pulled the trigger, to the witnesses who stood frozen in the morning light, to the shattered windshield glittering across the asphalt, to the blood left drying on the pavement, and to a three-year-old little girl who saw all of it.
That’s an unbearable place for the truth to live.
Because when the government takes a human life, it doesn’t get to seize the microphone before the body is cold. It doesn’t get to race the evidence to the finish line, flood the public with talking points, and mistake being first for being truthful. It doesn’t get to demand our trust while asking us to ignore our own eyes, dismiss eyewitnesses, and quietly forget that the people writing the official story are the very people whose actions that story exists to defend.
We’ve seen the playbook. We know every page by heart. Kill first. Control the story second. Put the dead on trial. Scatter just enough accusation, innuendo, and selective disclosure into the public square that the conversation quietly shifts away from the people who used the state’s power to take a life and toward the supposed flaws of the person who lost it. By the time the evidence catches up, the damage is already done. The lie has unpacked its suitcase. The truth is still looking for the baggage claim.
Joan Sebastian Guerrero was the second man federal immigration agents shot and killed in the span of a single week. The first was Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a father who spent thirty-five years building homes in Houston, raising three American sons, and chasing the legal status he’d spent a year and a half trying to secure before he was shot on his way to pick up his crew.
Two fathers.
Seven days.
Four children who no longer have one.
That’s the body count.
Don’t hand me “operations.”
Don’t hand me “enforcement actions.”
Don’t hand me the sterile vocabulary governments invent when they’re trying to launder unbearable human suffering into something that fits neatly inside a quarterly report.
Say what it is.
Fathers are dead.
Families have been shattered forever.
This is the arithmetic of grief.
The mathematics of absence.
The kind of loss that doesn’t end when the news cycle does, but echoes through graduations, weddings, Christmas mornings, ordinary Tuesdays, and every quiet moment in between, because there are some holes in a family that never stop taking the shape of the person who should still be standing there.
Begin there. End there.
Everything else is just camouflage for the unbearable.
ICE agents keep pulling the trigger because nothing meaningful happens when they do. No real accountability. No meaningful oversight. Just a lawless apparatus standing ready to launder whatever happened into whatever it needs to have been, wrapping irreversible violence in polished language and expecting the rest of us to mistake institutional certainty for truth.
An independent investigation isn’t a political demand.
It’s a moral one.
Joan Sebastian Guerrero deserves that.
His little girl deserves that.
And so do the American people.
Tonight, somewhere in America, a father will carry a sleeping child from the car to the house, feeling that familiar, fleeting heaviness of little arms draped around his neck, a head resting against his shoulder, the impossible miracle that children somehow become heavier and lighter at the very same time.
Somewhere else, a mother will stand in the doorway for one extra second after saying goodnight, watching the slow rise and fall of a tiny chest beneath a blanket covered in dinosaurs or princesses or cartoon dogs, quietly marveling at the astonishing ordinariness of a life that asks so little of us beyond loving one another well.
Joan Sebastian Guerrero’s little girl should have known him for the way he hugged her, the nicknames only fathers invent, the thousand tiny rituals that become childhood before anyone realizes they’re becoming memory.
Instead, the memory that now belongs to her is a street in Biddeford, Maine.
My kids aren’t little anymore. They’re teenagers now, long past Bluey pajamas and bedtime lullabies, but parenthood never really changes. The fears simply grow up alongside them. You stop worrying about choking hazards and start worrying about highways. You stop checking for monsters beneath the bed and start checking to make sure they made it home. The topography of fear changes.
Its heartbeat doesn’t.
And I can’t stop thinking about that little girl.
I can’t stop thinking about the life she was supposed to have, the version of her father she deserved to carry into adulthood. Every child deserves to remember a father’s laugh more vividly than the sound of the shots that took him away.
His name was Joan Sebastian Guerrero.
By tomorrow there will be another headline. Another family shattered. Another set of children waking up in a world that no longer contains the person who tucked them into bed the night before.
There is always another catastrophe arriving just in time to bury the last one before we’ve had the chance to reckon with it. Outrage is forced onto a conveyor belt moving too fast for conscience to keep up. Names become statistics. Fathers become news cycles. Children become photographs that flicker across our screens before disappearing beneath the next emergency.
And that isn’t some tragic quirk of modern life.
It’s how unbearable things become bearable to the people responsible for them.
The people who loved Joan Sebastian Guerrero will never have that luxury.
There are wounds that close.
There are wounds that scar.
And then there are wounds that become part of a family’s inheritance, passed silently from one generation to the next, living in Father’s Days that never stop aching, in wedding photographs framed around an absence, in grandchildren who will know their grandfather only through stories told by people still struggling to speak his name without breaking.
That’s what was taken.
Not just one man’s life.
Every tomorrow that belonged to him and every tomorrow that belonged to the people who loved him.
But the architects of this cruelty understand something terrifying about us.
They know human beings cannot live at a constant boil forever.
They know grief has limits.
They know outrage gets interrupted.
They know that if they can keep the country sprinting from one horror to the next, accountability never catches up.
And yet… they’re counting on something far darker than forgetfulness.
They’re counting on repetition.
Because power has always understood that the fastest way to make the unbearable survivable is to make it ordinary. To make horror so routine that it slips quietly into the background noise of everyday life. To make each fresh atrocity arrive before we’ve had time to mourn the last one.
They’re counting on us to look away.
They’re counting on us to keep living because life demands it.
They’re counting on grief to burn itself out.
They’re counting on our hearts to develop scar tissue.
They’re counting on enough fresh horror arriving tomorrow that this little girl’s worst day quietly slips behind the next one, and the next one, until even something as unbearable as watching your father die becomes just another story we vaguely remember reading.
That is the victory they’re chasing.
Not our agreement.
Our acclimation.
Because the day this stops shattering us isn’t the day we’ve become stronger.
It’s the day we’ve become accustomed to a level of cruelty no decent people should ever grow accustomed to.
We cannot give them that.
We cannot let survival curdle into surrender.
We cannot mistake numbness for resilience simply because feeling everything all the time is exhausting.
Somewhere tonight, a little girl is going to sleep without her father because she has no other choice.
Years from now, she’ll still remember that morning.
She’ll remember the sound.
She’ll remember the fear.
She’ll remember climbing into a car with her daddy and climbing out into a world where he no longer existed.
She will carry that Monday for the rest of her life.
The least the rest of us can do is carry it with her.
So don’t look away.
Don’t let tomorrow’s outrage steal today’s grief.
Don’t let another press conference, another scandal, another manufactured distraction bury Joan Sebastian Guerrero beneath the weight of our collective attention span.
Demand an independent investigation.
Demand answers worthy of his daughter.
Demand a country where children spend their mornings worrying about spelling tests instead of whether they’re about to lose a parent forever.
Demand a country where fathers leave for work expecting to come home for dinner.
Demand a government that understands the awesome power to take a human life comes chained forever to an equally awesome obligation to answer for it.
Do it for Joan.
Do it for his little girl.
Do it for every child who still believes the adults are supposed to keep them safe.
And do it because countries are not lost all at once.
They are lost one accepted outrage at a time.
One forgotten name at a time.
One abandoned child at a time.
Until one day we wake up and realize we didn’t cross a line.
We simply stopped noticing where it was.
His name was Joan Sebastian Guerrero.
He was twenty-six years old.
He was a father.
He was a human being.
He should still be here.
And with that, today’s song: (hate his politics, still love his music):
I love you guys.
Please stay safe out there!
Stay strong and stay connected to each other.
💙 Jo
