Three days after the immigration crackdown in Maine, the Department of Homeland Security said Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents had arrested “more than 100 illegal aliens.”
In a statement to the Guardian on Friday, DHS assistant secretary of public affairs Tricia McLaughlin said some of those in custody are “the worst of the worst” and “have been charged and convicted of heinous crimes,” but cited the same four examples released earlier this week.
Speaking to Fox News, ICE Deputy Assistant Director Patricia Hyde said the agency has compiled a list of 1,400 individuals in Maine it wants to target.
Immigrant rights groups are on alert as ICE focuses its operations on Maine’s two largest cities, Portland and Lewiston. Organizers say agents have targeted African nationals from Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola, many of whom are asylum seekers who have made the coastal state their home in recent decades.
On Wednesday, a local ICE monitoring hotline – organized and run by the Maine Immigrant Rights Coalition – said they received more than 1,100 calls, a 35% increase from the day before. Immigrants in Maine represent only about 4% of the state’s total population, most of whom have legal status to live and work in the U.S., according to a recent report of the Migration Policy Institute.
At a news conference in Portland on Thursday, Janet Mills, the state’s Democratic governor, said the Trump administration had not returned calls since the operation began. She added that her office had received reports of people without criminal records being detained and urged Homeland Security to be transparent in its actions. She said she would be “shocked” if federal law enforcement identified 1,400 individuals with criminal backgrounds.
“If they have warrants, show them,” she said. “We don’t believe in secret arrests or secret police.”
Mills also described widespread fear in schools, workplaces and businesses losing employees who are detained or don’t show up despite being legal residents of the state.
Earlier this week, a video of 28-year-old Crisitan Vaca – an Ecuadorian immigrant living in Maine with valid immigration status – went viral online. In the footage, federal agents appear outside Vaca’s home in Biddeford, 20 miles south of Portland, where he lives with his wife and young son. In an interview with the Associated Press in Spanish through a translator, Vaca said he approached officers as they were taking photos outside his home.
When Vaca refused to go outside, the video shows one of the officers tells him they will “be back for your whole family” through Vaca’s screen door.
“I have been in this country since September 2023,” Vaca, who works as a roofer, told the AP. “I have immigration status… the judge postponed my court date to another day. Now I have a new court date. I have my work permit. I have my social security number [sic].”
Local authorities this week also disparaged the scope of the federal immigration dragnet. Cumberland Sheriff Kevin Joyce said one of his corrections officer recruits was arrested by ICE agents on Wednesday evening.
“This is an individual who was authorized to work in the state of Maine. We have vetted him,” the sheriff said of the unnamed recruit.
Joyce was one of more than a hundred national sheriffs who met with Trump’s border czar Tom Homan last year. “The book and the movie don’t fit together,” Joyce told reporters Thursday. “We are told one story, which is completely different from what is happening.”
The Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project (ILAP), Maine’s only statewide immigration legal services organization, said it had received several anxious calls as the crackdown continued. This includes a pregnant woman who contacted ILAP because she was “terrified to leave her home to go to a medical appointment.” Another person called and said someone had “triggered the fire alarm in her building in a desperate attempt to save people from ICE.” ILAP said they had received reports of teachers escorting immigrant children home from school being followed by officers and forcing their way into the lobby of an apartment complex.
“It is clear that the overall operation is anything but purposeful,” said Sue Roche, executive director of ILAP. “People are being racially profiled on the streets and in their cars. As is their playbook, ICE is doing everything it can to cause maximum brutality and chaos.”
ILAP also noted that they are seeing arrested people transferred out of state to detention centers elsewhere in New England. DHS did not respond to Guardian’s request for comment on where detainees are being held because Maine does not have a dedicated immigration detention facility.
In Lewiston, it is “difficult to overestimate the level of fear within the community,” said Democratic congressional candidate Jordan Wood, who is running to replace outgoing U.S. Rep. Jared Golden. “I have heard of as many as 20% of students at certain schools not showing up,” Wood, who was born, raised and lives in the area, told the Guardian.
He added that the community’s response to the ICE surge — from making sure immigrants know their rights to sharing where officers have been spotted — has been extremely encouraging. “It is important to know that the community they are coming after will not stand idly by while our neighbors are terrorized,” Wood said.
At her press conference in Portland, Mills still wanted more information about the decision to target the Pine Tree State. “Why Maine? Why now? What were the orders that came from above? Who’s giving the orders?” she said, adding that state officials have contacted the Trump administration but still “don’t have any answers.”
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