A 26-year-old man from Colombia, authorised to work in the USA and issued a Social Security number, was shot dead by ICE on Monday morning as he sat in his car at the corner of Pool and Hill streets in Biddeford, Maine. He was on his way to work. His family reached the Maine Immigrants' Rights Coalition through a hotline in the hours after.

ICE and the Department of Homeland Security spent the day saying nothing to the reporters who asked, and then provided three different stories.

Around noon, Senator Angus King reported that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin had told him the dead man was the target of a warrant, was under orders to leave, and had "weaponised" his vehicle. Hours later Mullin rang King back to say the man was not the target of the warrant after all. Then at twenty to four the agency posted its written version to X, and the word "weaponised" was then gone. In its place DHS said only that ICE had been watching the last address of "an illegal alien with a final order of removal," that "an illegal alien departed the residence," that the vehicle "attempted to flee," and that "fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon." The driver "was struck." He "passed away from his injuries." There were no body cameras, so there is, by the regime's own admission, no footage of the moment it killed him, beyond that captured by the public.

They do not say their officer was in danger. The claim that the man had been trying to ram the agent at the scene does not survive into the written statement, because not even these corrupt agencies can stand by the excuse this time.

Their own use-of-force policy permits lethal force only to stop a threat, and in their own account they name none, they reach instead for "public safety," which is the phrase you use when your grasping at straws to justify state-sponsored murder. The language they use is designed to mute the reality of the incident; an officer did not shoot a man through his own windscreen, he "discharged his weapon," the man was not killed, he "was struck," he "passed away." This is the language of an agency absolutely desperate to cover up their own brutality.

The phrase an "ICE-involved shooting" appears in coverage across the USA, providing a level of cover that the U.S. government themselves can't supply. This places the agency beside a death rather than at the centre of one, it holds open the question of who fired and why, it leaves the same space DHS then fills. The words change, "weaponised" at noon, "fearing for public safety" by evening, but the work is constant, and it is to keep the reader from saying the plain thing, that an armed agent of the state killed an unarmed man on his way to work.

A witness, Lucas Scott, saw two officers in green ICE vests surround a white sedan with their weapons drawn, and heard four shots. Another resident, who gave only her first name, Em, because she fears ICE, watched the small white car go in circles in the intersection as though the driver had no control, agents pressed against the driver's door trying to keep it from hitting anything. A third neighbour, Daniel Boucher, saw the larger white vehicle ram the smaller one, then strike it again, before an officer opened the door and pulled out a man bleeding heavily from the head. The man said he had tried to stop. He said it again, Boucher recalled, and then he died. The Kia was left with four bullet holes through the windscreen.

A car does not circle the intersection under the control of a man fleeing, it circles when the man steering it has been shot through the glass in front of him. The vehicle that supposedly fled was rammed by government vehicles, twice, and it moved because they fired, not the reverse. The danger to the public that they now invoke was the two tonnes of federal SUV driven into a stopped car at a residential crossroads. They were the danger to the public, as evidenced by a member of the public losing their life on the back of their presence.

This is the second such killing in under a week, and by the count the Associated Press keeps, at least the ninth death in an encounter with immigration agents since the crackdown began. On 7 July in Houston, an ICE officer shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican national, dead during what they called a traffic stop as he drove to a construction job. DHS said he rammed a federal vehicle, ignored commands, weaponised his van, and that the officer fired in self-defence. The officers had no body cameras, a source later conceded he was not the target of the operation, and the story fell apart the moment video contradicted it. In Biddeford as in Houston, within hours the man they killed turned out not to be the man they were after. In Minneapolis in January they said Renee Good had tried to run an officer down, and that was disputed too. "Weaponised" is not a finding, it is a form letter, and the tell in Biddeford is that when it came time to file the written one, with the inspector general watching, they would not sign their name to it.

Biddeford's own police will not investigate the killing on their streets, their role, they said, was to provide security at the scene and send all questions to ICE. The Maine attorney general's office says it is investigating, ICE says its own inspector general will, the FBI is expected to take it over, the agent who fired is on leave, and no bodycam footage anyone will admit to has surfaced. So the federal end of it comes down to the regime examining the regime. The people of Biddeford did not wait for that. Hundreds filled Mechanics Park through the afternoon, marched up Main Street, tried to force their way into Senator Susan Collins's office and banged on the locked doors until officers wedged themselves in front of them, then pushed on to City Hall. Em Akerley put it from her second-floor window as plainly as anyone in authority has managed all day. She did not know who he was, she said, but he did not deserve to be executed in the street.

We are documenting deaths by immigration enforcement as they happen. We are looking for tips and media to help us identify the killer, you can learn more about how you can help on theicelist.org.

They are telling you a version of the same story they used to justify the killing of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. They told you a version of it in Houston six days ago when they killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, they will tell you another the next time, and every time, it will be a statement based on lies, designed to justify and excuse state-sponsored killings.