BIDDEFORD — The apartment building where Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero lived with his family is much quieter than it was a week ago.

The three-story structure at 53 Pool St. is home to a large number of immigrant families, according to residents and neighbors. Kids often play in the sidewalk outside, residents work on cars in the parking lot, and people go in and out of the building as they head to work and come back home again.

Early Monday morning, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Guerrero, a 26-year-old immigrant from Colombia, just feet from the building’s front door. He was not the intended target of an arrest warrant, federal officials later confirmed.

Now, a sense of fear has paralyzed many living there, residents said.

53 Pool Street in Biddeford on Wednesday. (Daryn Slover/Staff Photographer)

“There’s a lot of families, a lot of young kids in that apartment (building). It’s usually very noisy,” said Isaac Black, who lives in a unit beneath the Guerrero family. “You can always smell something cooking. They all cook so much food.”

“But now you can’t hear anything. You can’t smell anything,” Black said. “It’s too quiet.”

Guerrero’s killing has sent shock waves across the world. But its impact has been especially pronounced among southern Maine’s immigrant communities, which were already on edge in the wake of an immigration enforcement surge across the state earlier this year that resulted in more than 200 people being detained.

As news reporters and television camera crews from across the country descended on Guerrero’s neighborhood, the usual bustle of residents going about their daily lives has ground almost to a halt.

Media report from the intersection of Hill and Pool Streets, where a man was shot and killed by a federal immigration agent in Biddeford on Monday. (Daryn Slover/Staff Photographer)<?xml version="1.0"?> Purchase this image

“Families, individuals, communities, went sheltering in place,” said Mufalo Chitam, executive director of the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition. “Everybody in that family, in that neighborhood, who is an immigrant, is really fearing for their lives.”

“He was going to work. He just left his house. And he got shot,” she added.

The 77 Convenience Store is just a few blocks from Guerrero’s apartment. Its shelves are stocked with a wide array of groceries, snacks and other goods from myriad cultures. Many immigrants who live nearby do their shopping at the store, its owner said. Guerrero did, too.

But since the shooting on Monday, business has been much, much slower.

“It’s usually 75 people in here each day. We went down to a half, maybe more,” said the shop’s owner, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who has lived in Maine more than 20 years. He asked not to be named out of fear of ICE retaliation.

“People are scared,” he said. “It’s a quiet neighborhood. This (kind of) thing doesn’t happen here.”

Guerrero had been in the store about a week ago, the man said. He often came in with his partner and 3-year-old daughter.

“Everybody (is) coming here looking for a different life. Something better,” he said. “But now it feels different. It’s just crazy that this happened here.”

When ICE agents came to Maine in January, many immigrants began considering whether to leave the state — and the country — altogether. Some ended up deciding to move. Others stayed and felt a lingering sense of unease, which has been exacerbated by Guerrero’s killing.

MB, an Angolan immigrant who asked to be referred to only by his initials out of fear of ICE retribution, moved to southern Maine in 2018. He sought asylum from political persecution in his home country after speaking out against the government there.

He hoped that America — and Maine — would be safe. But January’s enforcement action and Monday’s killing have shattered the sense of security MB sought here. Now he’s contemplating whether to leave.

MB said he only leaves the house to go to work and occasionally grocery shop. He tries to drive as cautiously as possible, always signaling to avoid being pulled over. He rarely rides in the car with his wife. If they’re both taken at the same time, he doesn’t know who would look after their four children.

“You never know if you’re going to come back home,” MB said.

He has friends in other states who’ve said that there’s minimal ICE presence near them. Immigration enforcement agents have been in MB’s neighborhood, and his children became even more afraid after the shooting on Monday.

“Why is it that everywhere we go, we have to go through the same experience?” he recalled his daughter asking. “We have to hide from people.”