July 13 (Reuters) – A person was killed on Monday in a shooting involving U.S. immigration agents in Maine, a top state lawmaker said, days after a man was fatally shot by a U.S. agent during a traffic stop in Texas.
“This morning a shooting occurred in Biddeford. A person was killed. ICE was involved,” Ryan Fecteau, the speaker of the Maine House of Representatives and a native of Biddeford, wrote on Facebook. “State Police and the Department of Public Safety are now on scene to gather details and would expect the FBI to investigate as well.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Department of Homeland Security officials could not be immediately reached for comment. Biddeford police did not comment and referred an inquiry to ICE, while the mayor did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Biddeford, a city of over 21,000 people, is located 15 miles south of Portland and 90 miles north of Boston.
Monday’s incident comes six days after an ICE agent fatally shot a man identified as Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston during a traffic stop, sparking protests in the city’s heavily Hispanic East End.
Hours after that shooting, ICE said in a statement that Salgado, a Mexican national living in the U.S. illegally for more than three decades, rammed a law enforcement vehicle with his van and attempted to run over an officer who fired in self-defense.
The agency has not offered any evidence to support that account. In other instances over the past year, initial statements from immigration enforcement agencies about their use of force have been contradicted by video footage or other evidence, sometimes in court.
Three men who witnessed the shooting have challenged ICE’s account, a lawyer for two of the men told reporters on Friday. Salgado, a father of three, was a construction worker in the process of obtaining a work permit, relatives have said.
The shootings took place amid President Donald Trump’s ongoing federal crackdown on migrants nationwide that has drawn objections from local Democratic leaders and protests in multiple cities.
(Reporting by Katharine Jackson, Bhargav Acharya, Daphne Psaledakis, Helen Coster and Kristina Cooke; editing by Susan Heavey and Mark Porter)
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