It was 7am on 13 July this year. A warm, sunny morning, as residents of Biddeford, Maine, left their homes, got into their cars and began their commute. Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero came out of the apartment he lived in with his partner and daughter and drove off in his white car. Minutes later, neighbors heard three pops. Durán Guerrero was dead.

More than 1,200 miles (1,900km) away in Ocilla, Georgia, Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva was shuffled on to a bus. Private sector guards and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials were beginning the process of transferring him and several other immigrants from one detention center to another nearly two hours away. Ten minutes into the ride, he became unconscious. Doctors at a nearby hospital pronounced him dead.

Less than 24 hours later, Juan Jairo Coronilla Durán, pulled up to a gas station near a busy highway in St Augustine, Florida, as the sun was rising in the bright sky. Soon after, he would lie dead on the road nearby, hit by a semitruck when running away from immigration officers.

There were no ties between Durán Guerrero, Arenas-Silva and Coronilla Durán, but within those 24 hours, the three men suddenly became connected as casualties in the latest phase of Donald Trump’s aggressive anti-immigration campaign.

Twenty-four hours. Three states. Three people dead. Countless lives changed in seconds.

The men in Maine and Florida were not even ICE’s intended targets for arrest – they became “collaterals”, as agency officials call them.

“Three people dying in one day is an amplification of what we’ve already seen,” said Andrew Free, a former immigration attorney and investigative journalist who has for years extensively worked on ICE-related death cases. “The choices that the Trump regime has made since January 2025 have had the consequence of increasing the numbers of people who die in the field and in custody.”