“If those are facts, I don’t think he should have ever cleared vetting,” Homan told CNN’s Dana Bash.
Homan said the agency’s vetting process is part of the ongoing investigation.
“Did the vetting process fail?” he said. “Was that information not available? Did they not know?”
He added: “Certainly, if this person had that type of history, it would have been a vetting issue and it should have been brought to the attention of those who make those decisions.”
While federal officials have not publicly identified Brouillette as the shooter, Ashley Brouillette, who was married to him from 2007 to 2009, said she spoke to him after the shooting, which he acknowledged his role in.
“He kept saying it was justified,” she told the Globe in an interview earlier this month.
Ashley Brouillette told the Globe that David Brouillette had choked her, slammed her to the floor, and once threw boiling water on her. Brouillette’s other ex-wife, Lucinda Brouillette, recently filed a court document alleging that he once threatened to kill her with a gun.
Both allegations were made amid messy divorce proceedings in which Brouillette also accused each woman of domestic abuse.
These details about Brouillette’s past have surfaced amid outcry over the July 13 killing of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, who was shot while driving in Biddeford.
Officials have said Durán Guerrero wasn’t the target of the operation they were carrying out. It is the latest fatal shooting by federal immigration officials since the Trump administration deployed thousands of new ICE agents as part of its nationwide immigration crackdown.
Less than a week before Durán Guerrero’s death, another immigrant in Texas was shot and killed in his truck during a traffic stop by ICE agents. He was also reportedly not the intended target of their attempted stop.
The shootings have renewed criticism that ICE has hired unqualified applicants in its rush to staff up and comply with Trump’s immigration crackdown. Many law enforcement experts have also questioned the training provided to agents, saying their behavior during traffic stops violates widely accepted police procedures.
On Sunday, Homan said the vetting process and training are both “under review.” Still, he largely defended the agency’s hiring procedures.
“ICE has about 30,000 employees,” he said. “They all go through vetting. This is kind of a rare instance.”
A spokesperson for ICE told the Globe in a previous statement that the agency “evaluates all available information for every applicant.”
Officials who left before the second Trump administration said the agency had a detailed hiring process designed to ensure anyone hired to enforce the nation’s immigration laws was trustworthy, the Globe previously reported.
ICE applicants could be subjected to polygraph examinations. Standard government hiring forms ask about medical history, including head injuries and mental health diagnoses, as well as about missed child support payments and current protective orders. It’s unclear what Brouillette disclosed to ICE.
Allyson Chiu can be reached at allyson.chiu@globe.com. Follow her on X @_allysonchiu.