Johan Sebastian Durán Guerrero

I’m from Biddeford. My family has roots in that area that predate the city’s founding. But I never met Johan Sebastian Durán Guerrero, the 26-year-old father murdered by an ICE agent Monday morning.

I believe we are all responsible for one another and it feels like that responsibility grows with proximity. 

When a neighbor is murdered, the murderer not only robs its victim of their life and their family of a loved one, the murderer also robs a community of its responsibility and sorrow can feel as though it has gained a dimension. 

This was the fog binding together the hundreds of people in attendance at the candlelight vigil in Biddeford on Monday night. And it was overwhelming. Sorrow and anger and dread captured us all, with the exception of a small group of pro-ICE agitators. 

The murder was so brutal and cruel, it seemed incomprehensible that anyone would not feel withered by the tragedy. Yet, there they were, in MAGA hats, holding banners, laughing and screeching incoherent hate into a megaphone. 

Biddeford is no stranger to this kind of hate. A little more than a century ago, the Ku Klux Klan tried to invade the city as a show of force against its immigrant communities.

Eerily, that attempted invasion happened in almost the exact same spot where the friends of ICE were screeching their incoherent hate at Johan Sebastian Durán Guerrero‘s mourners.

White hoods again replaced with red hats.

It feels like history repeating itself, but that isn’t what’s happening.

It’s worse. 

Contrary to popular belief, the KKK was not a mass of shoeless backwoodsmen. They were largely middle and upper-middle class business and property owners. In 1924, the year they attempted to invade Biddeford, the KKK claimed membership of more than 20-percent of Maine’s population. They influenced elections and installed municipal governments. The KKK was also the first organization to patrol our national borders. 

When the Klan finally collapsed, it wasn’t because its members came to Jesus. It was because their business model was a pyramid scheme. But their damage was not undone. It was supported. It was protected. It was built upon.

Former klansmen continued on as pillars of their communities. Their hateful ideas remained normalized, excused as “political differences”. The government they installed in Portland—Maine’s largest city—remains to this day.

Nationally, the KKK was a driving force behind the National Origins Act of 1924. The Act created the US Border Patrol, which hired klansmen in bulk. 

Over time, their targets and costumery have changed, but their screeching never stopped. It’s been sustained by courtrooms and legislatures and dinner tables where, “You’ll have to excuse my grandpa. He’s from a different time.” 

As we stood there, together, mourning our neighbor, the incoherent hate being screeched through a megaphone may have been understood as history repeating itself.

But please know, for something to repeat, it must first stop.

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