WEDNESDAY: He had permission to work in this country!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 15, 2026

But he didn't have legal status? Tomorrow, we expect to discuss the second person who recently lost his life.   

For today, we return to a bit of a technical question from this morning's report. It's a question about Johan Sebastian Guerrero, 25 years old, "always so happy and so polite," late of Biddeford, Maine.  

The question: 

Did this young man "have legal status?" That's the way the question was framed in the headline of this New York Times report.   

Did this young man "have legal status?" In this newer report in the Washington Post, it starts to look like he did:

Man killed by ICE came to Maine seeking better life for young daughter   

The woman stood in a hallway of her apartment building, pressing her hands up against a window as she took in a scene of unfathomable violence: The white Kia her partner had been driving was angled against a curb, its windshield pierced with bullets.

“Mi amor, mi amor,” she cried. His lifeless body was lying in the street. When she and her 3-year-old daughter went outside, she dropped to her knees and sobbed, witnesses said.

Her partner, 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian citizen, was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Monday morning on the block where the couple lives in this small city in southern Maine, the second deadly shooting by ICE in less than a week.

Durán entered the United States via the southern border in September 2023, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in a statement, and received work authorization in May 2025. 

According to the DHS, he received authorization to work in this country as of May of last year. Forgive us for being simple-minded, but if the federal government has conferred that status on someone, it's hard to see how the recipient can be said to be in the country illegally.   

That's how it seems to us! But thanks to the phenomenon we've described as "the complexification of everything," there was room in the Post's report for this additional copy:

ICE enforcement and removal officers appeared to be looking for someone else. They were conducting surveillance at the last known address of an undocumented immigrant who was subject to a final deportation order, an agency spokesperson said. 

But Durán was not the person they were looking for, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said in several interviews.

[...]

In a statement, a DHS spokesperson said that Durán did not have legal status in the U.S. Durán likely received work authorization while seeking asylum, an immigration lawyer who reviewed the DHS statement said.  

Say what? Speaking directly to the language which appeared in the New York Times headline, a DHS spokesperson is now quoted saying that he didn't "have legal status." The Post then repeats the fact that he did have permission to work!

He'd been given permission to work in this country. (Also, it seems, to seek formal asylum.) But that certainly doesn't mean that he was in southern Maine legally!

Should the Post have tried to straighten this out? Yes, we think they should have. But so it goes in tongue-tied modern cultures driven by an instinct for various forms of mumble-mouthed verbal complexification.   

We humans! Within the modern American context, discussion of almost every major issue is clouded by this instinct. 

A wide array of murky formulations may seem to clash with each other. Attention doesn't get paid. Tribal propagandists may repeat only the formulations which support the political outcomes preferred by their own infernal tribe.   

He had permission to work, but not to be here! As we've noted in the past:

We humans are skilled at building tall buildings, less skilled at everything else.

With apologies, this: "Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday." 

This case isn't really the sort of thing the later Wittgenstein was talking about, bit it almost comes somewhat close.