Late one Sunday in May, a Winthrop police officer saw a man napping behind the wheel of a blue pickup truck parked in front of a laundromat.
The officer ran the truck’s plates, according to a police report obtained by the Bangor Daily News. The vehicle was registered to an Ecuadorian man with an inactive license. When it pulled onto Main Street, the officer stopped the truck for a loud exhaust, and when the driver and his two passengers handed over Ecuadorian passports, he called U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Border agents detained everyone in the truck that night — two men and a 19-year-old woman — for lacking legal authorization to be in the country, jail records show. Whether the officers knew it or not, the arrest targeted a notable group of immigrants who have been quietly swept up in Maine during the federal immigration crackdown: Ecuadorian roofers.
Since President Donald Trump returned to office in January, rolling detentions have hit New England’s roofing industry, where these immigrants have made deep inroads performing one of the most dangerous jobs in construction, according to interviews with undocumented roofers, workers’ advocates, lawyers and industry professionals as well as a Bangor Daily News review of public records.
The prevalence of detained roofers may help explain why Ecuadorians show up at disproportionate rates in detention statistics. Latinos make up less than 10% of Maine’s tiny immigrant population, but many members of Ecuadorian communities to the west and south of Boston travel to work in the region’s rural north.
More than 40 workers associated with the MetroWest Workers Center in Framingham, Massachusetts, drove to Maine over the past year and were detained, nearly all of whom were roofers from Ecuador, the center’s director, Diego Low, said. The most recent case occurred Saturday night in Brunswick. A police officer called border agents on an Ecuadorian man who lives in Framingham after stopping him as he left a gas station on U.S. Route 1, according to a federal court petition the man filed Monday challenging his detention.
Immigration authorities have also detained Ecuadorian roofers as they drove to work in central Maine, left job sites near the New Hampshire border, laid shingles in The County and who lived in the more metropolitan areas outside of Portland, according to examples identified by the BDN through police records, court documents and interviews.
The trend provides a more detailed look at how the Republican president’s deportation agenda, pitched as a crackdown on criminals, has carved into a community of immigrants that has shaped a subset of the region’s blue-collar economy. The federal government has not appeared to train a similar focus on the companies who hire them.
“It shows how much the Ecuadorian community is supporting the roofing industry in New England and the extent that they’re targeted,” said Shaan Chatterjee, a Massachusetts-based immigration lawyer who has represented at least five roofers arrested in Maine.
When Maria, a 26-year-old undocumented mother from Ecuador, arrived in the U.S. with her husband in 2020, the couple quickly found work in New England’s roofing industry, she said in an interview this month. She agreed to speak on the condition that the BDN use her first name only due to her immigration status.
Roofing has come to rely on immigrant labor even more than the rest of the construction industry, where surveys show that at least a third of workers are foreign-born. A majority of roofers are estimated to be immigrants, many of whom are undocumented, according to a recent Stateline analysis.
The danger of the job has structured the industry in a way that has made undocumented labor an attractive option, said Sergio Chavez, a professor at Rice University in Texas who is writing a book about immigrant roofers and has interviewed more than 350 of them.
Roofers experience the highest rates of fatal falls by a longshot within construction, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2023, more than 100 roofers died on the job, the agency found. As a result, insurance premiums for roofing are some of the highest in the construction industry. Companies avoid that cost and liability by hiring subcontractors to perform the actual work, Chavez said.
Subcontracting also provides a layer of plausible deniability for companies whose business models rely on undocumented workers but do not employ them directly. In the northeast, Ecuadorians “dominate” the industry, Chavez said.
Low estimated that two-thirds of the workers compensation cases he’s helped with involved Ecuadorians because most of those cases involve injuries from roofing. On Tuesday, he was working on finding proper medical support for a 36-year-old man that broke a kneecap falling more than 15 feet from a Maine roof onto concrete and had just been discharged from the hospital.
Immigrants have usually taken so many risks just to get to the U.S. that they’re more willing to accept the danger of a job like roofing, Low said. For instance, the man arrested in Brunswick last Saturday told the court he’d left Ecuador after being “brutally beaten” in 2022 for his leadership role in a Christian movement.
Maria said she and her husband left Ecuador to seek the means to pay off a crushing debt. She prays to God every time that her husband gets up on a roof. By the end of the day, his shoulder is often bruised from carrying bundles of shingles up a ladder. Her job usually involved collecting old shingles from the ground.
“We’re just working and trying to support our families,” Maria said.
It is common for immigrant crews to leave Massachusetts for Maine at 4 a.m. on Monday and not return until Saturday evening, aiming to complete a roof every day if weather allows, she and others said. Her crew only worked for a single company here, as if they were employees. At one point, the couple moved to Bangor, but jobs would still take them up to two hours away. They returned to Massachusetts about three years ago around the birth of their first child, she said.
“That’s the best about you guys: one roof, one day,’” she once heard a contractor say. One offered to feed and house them because he was so impressed by their work ethic.
The owner of a roofing company in western Maine, who spoke to the BDN on the condition that his company not be named due to the sensitivity of immigration issues, said he started hiring Ecuadorian subcontractors about five years ago after he nearly went out of business. He recalled a project that dragged on for weeks until he hired a crew from Massachusetts who completed the job in a single day.
“It’s really hard to find any reliable local labor that works as hard as they do,” he said. “I’ve tried.”
The influx of immigrant crews has frustrated others. Shane Felcher, who owns Right Price Home Solutions in Gardiner, prefers to hire employees directly because he wants to employ local tradesmen and do things by the book, he said. He struggles to compete with the larger companies that cut down on their overhead costs by relying on subcontractors, especially those he suspects will work harder and for less because of their immigration status.
“I get employers complaining that they can’t find employees and I can see how immigration helps that,” he said. “You’re just willing to take advantage of immigrants willing to work cheaper than the locals. That doesn’t seem morally right to me either.”
Low questioned the moral culpability of the undocumented worker who is breaking the law to feed their family versus the comfortable business owner who hires them. In his view, the federal government seems more interested in holding immigrants accountable than the industries that benefit from their labor. A spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, did not reply to an inquiry about whether the agency had enforced any worksite violations against Maine roofing employers this year.
“Why would an industry use large numbers of undocumented workers if it didn’t find a self-interest in doing it?” he said. “That is not only in the wages you pay them, but how much they’ll bend over backward to do exactly what [their bosses] say despite the fact that it is already dark and they’re working by the headlights of their trucks.”
The threat of deportation can embolden bad actors. Don Wilkinson, a lawyer for the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project in Maine, recalled a conversation with an undocumented man within the past year who fell off a roof and badly injured himself, and his employer threatened to call ICE if he filed for workers compensation or contacted authorities. The organization declined to provide more precise details given the confidential nature of their interaction.
Last Friday, a reporter was present when an undocumented Ecuadorian woman came into Low’s office seeking help because a Maine contractor had not paid her crew $12,000 and now wasn’t answering phone calls. Low knew she would have to navigate the repayment delicately.
Before the second Trump administration, immigration authorities prioritized the arrest of undocumented immigrants who committed crimes, usually serious ones, said Amada Armenta, a UCLA professor who studies the connection between the immigration and criminal justice systems. It was also rare for officials to target workers or those in the process of pursuing legal status, such as asylum or parole.
“Now, there is no preference,” she said.
In Maine, the Border Patrol reported last month that it has made record arrests in 2025, detaining 725 people as of Oct 1. It did not say how many had criminal records. ICE has been comparatively less active here but also saw a spike in apprehensions, arresting 230 people between January and mid-October, according to the most recently available statistics published by the Deportation Data Project. Only 20% had a criminal conviction, while the rest had pending criminal charges (43%) or no criminal record (35%), the data show.
In June, Maine border agents used a drone to observe members of an Ecuadorian roofing crew at a job site in Rangeley, then detained the group when they left, according to a law enforcement document provided to the BDN by a lawyer for one of the detained workers. (The Portland Press Herald first reported the agency’s use of drone surveillance.)
A Border Patrol spokesperson said the agency employs “a range of techniques” to identify and arrest people in the country unlawfully to “ensure appropriate consequences are applied to those violating our laws.”
The spokesperson said the Houlton Sector had noticed an uptick in encounters with Ecuadorians but was not targeting any specific demographic.
“The objective of these operations is to identify and remove all individuals unlawfully present within our area of operations, regardless of country of origin or any other classification,” the statement said.
Other roofers were detained after an initial encounter with local police, illustrating a longstanding informal coordination with federal authorities that Maine Democrats and immigration advocates have fought back against. Gov. Janet Mills, a term-limited Democrat running for U.S. Senate in 2026, announced this week that she will allow a bill outlawing such collaboration to become law, saying “the times call for it.”
The Winthrop arrest was one example of that practice, even though the town’s police chief had distanced his department from federal agents in public. In April, his department became one of the only Maine police agencies to initiate a formal partnership with ICE under a program that grants local cops certain federal immigration enforcement powers.
The backlash prompted the chief, Paul Ferland, to withdraw the department’s application. But just weeks later, his officer held the group of roofers at the laundromat on behalf of border patrol, including the two passengers who had not committed the traffic offenses for which the officer had pulled the truck over. Ferland did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.
The police report recorded the immigrants’ address as a white house overlooking the Kennebec River in Augusta that is owned by the founders and namesakes of James & Whitney Co., one of the state’s largest roofing companies, property records show. The company declined to comment on the case.
“Our focus remains on helping our community protect their largest investment during this upcoming storm season,” an employee responded in a text message.
Agents brought that group from Winthrop to the Franklin County jail in Farmington, a facility that saw a surge in immigrant detainees in the six months after Trump took office. (The jail made an agreement with Border Patrol to temporarily house newly arrested detainees but stopped in July due to renovations, an agency spokesman said.)
From January to June, border agents booked 102 detainees at the jail, more than 80% of whom were from South and Central American countries. The largest demographic group by far was Ecuadorians, at 35% of the total detainees, according to a BDN analysis of detention records obtained through a public records request.
The confidentiality of the immigration system means it is difficult to know how many of those detainees worked in roofing. But the trend mirrors other statistics showing that Ecuadorians have been rounded up at some of the highest rates in the state. They also made up the second-largest demographic group arrested by ICE in Maine, the Deportation Data Project data show. As of mid-October, nearly a quarter of those arrested were from the southern African country of Angola, followed by 13.5% from Ecuador. (The number with a criminal conviction matched the statewide trends, at 22%.)
JoAnn Dodge, a Massachusetts-based immigration lawyer who works with construction workers, has come to view the drive to Maine as another way that roofing can endanger her clients. One of them, Richard Sanipatin, was detained with two other Ecuadorian men after a Kennebec County sheriff’s deputy stopped their truck around 7:30 a.m. in the town of China for speeding in March, according to a police report.
The deputy held them on the side of the road for border agents for an hour and a half when he learned the driver and his front seat passenger were from Ecuador and asked them if they had documents from entering the country, the police report stated. The men had been driving from Massachusetts to a roofing job, Dodge said.
Sanipatin, who had been seeking asylum before his arrest, challenged his detention in Maine District Court, but his legal petition became moot when ICE transferred him out of the court’s jurisdiction to a county jail in New Hampshire, then a federal detention center in New Mexico known for treating detainees like “animals,” according to court records and a report about the detention center by the state American Civil Liberties Union chapter. A judge ordered him deported on May 30, according to a summary of his case posted online.
The Franklin County detention records show how common it is for the federal government to shuffle immigrant detainees around the country, which lawyers say makes it harder to represent them. A BDN analysis of the records and information provided by the federal immigration courts found that their cases were heard in as many as 14 different states. In early August, shortly after the BDN received the records, 27 detainees were still detained in facilities across the country, mostly in southern states like Texas and Louisiana, according to ICE’s detainee locator.
The shift in the federal government’s crackdown has probably been felt more severely by individual roofers than by the industry at large. But that could change over time. Nationally, blue-collar workers are increasingly caught up in the federal government’s immigration dragnet, sending ripples of anxiety through industries that depend on immigrants.
In August, a national survey by the Associated General Contractors of America found workforce shortages within the construction industry are the primary driver behind project delays. Nearly a third of firms that participated in the survey reported being affected by intensifying immigration enforcement.
“That’ll be a problem,” said Chavez, the Texas professor. “You’re going to deport people? What’s their plan to address the labor needs of the industry?”
Closer to the northern border, Maria said she knows of some roofers no longer risking the drive to Maine because they are afraid officers will stop their trucks or arrest them when they get gas, she said. In October, her husband was detained while working in New Hampshire; a judge released him from custody while his case is pending in the courts partially because the couple has two children under the age of 3, both of whom are citizens, she said.
That same month, Maria obtained her first work permit as part of her process of applying for asylum, she said. Her time in roofing is over. She wants a job in a store.
This reporting was supported by the Poynter Institute with funds from the Catena Foundation.
Callie Ferguson is the deputy investigations editor for Maine Focus, the BDN’s investigations team. She can be reached at cferguson@bangordailynews.com.