LEWISTON, Maine — The day after the mayor of Maine’s second-largest city announced that immigration agents planned to ramp up their presence here, the streets were quiet but the mood was tense.
One property manager whose tenants are almost exclusively African immigrants described how citizen parents have been driving undocumented neighbors’ kids to school and dropping off groceries so they didn’t have to leave their homes. She showed a reporter a form being passed around so undocumented parents could designate temporary guardians for their children in the event of their arrest.
Others decided not to stick around to see what happens in Lewiston in the coming days, she said, referring to a pair of asylum seekers from Angola who handed over the keys to their apartment yesterday and said they planned to head for the Canadian border.
Federal officials have not confirmed plans to target Lewiston and Portland, the hubs of Maine’s African immigrant communities. But a police source confirmed the plans, and local officials have interpreted the widespread rumors to be true. The prospect has put residents and officials in both cities on edge on the heels of an aggressive federal operation in Minnesota.
“People feel like sitting ducks,” said Martha Stein, the executive director of Hope Acts, a Portland-based organization that assists asylum seekers. Like Lewiston, the city was quiet when she and a colleague drove around that morning to look for signs of the federal government’s presence. So far, she has noticed greater shifts in behavior due to the suspense.
“We know food insecurity is huge [among asylum seekers] and they just weren’t seeing the numbers this week that they normally see,” she said. “They’re afraid. They are afraid to leave their homes.”
In Lewiston, some residents pointed to what they believe are more visible signs of immigration authorities in the city. A store clerk in the city’s Tree Streets, a downtown neighborhood that is the poorest in the state and home to many of the city’s immigrant families, witnessed trucks with Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement parked near her business on multiple days this week. She’s also noticed immigrant customers looking over their shoulders more often, especially younger ones.
The impact of immigration enforcement in the city isn’t new. The property manager said her tenants have been getting detained since Trump took office last year. Her fiance, a Congolese asylum seeker, was detained last winter at the Canadian border, days before the birth of their second child. He has never met his daughter because he has been detained since in New York and is appealing an August deportation order.
Many of her tenants receive rental assistance through a local immigrant advocacy organization. Staff there have mentioned agents visiting the office to ask questions.
There is some local confusion over why the federal government would try to crack down on that community. Maine’s well-established Somali population, which numbers around 3,000 people, took hold in the early 2000s. Roughly two-thirds are American citizens by naturalization or birth.
The rest may have other forms of permanent legal status, such as a green card, although President Donald Trump moved this week to strip away other protections to Somalis. In Minnesota, his administration said it was investigating Somalis with pending green card applications. It is unclear how many Somali immigrants in that situation live in Maine.
An impending crackdown here could more heavily hit other members of the African diaspora who arrived here more recently seeking asylum, including immigrants from Angola and the Congo. Many of them have work permits and jobs at local businesses, including manufacturing plants and the massive Walmart distribution center in Lewiston.
“I know my people. They are good people. They love to work,” said Ernesto Charles, the pastor of the Zion Church of All Nations in Lewiston, which has African asylum seekers in its congregation.
He is aware of one parishioner in detention, an 18-year-old arrested several months ago after a fight. Lately, others have sought his counsel about what they can do to avoid a similar fate. There is only so much he can tell them.
“I can’t change U.S. law,” he said. “I don’t have nothing to do. Just pray to God to protect my people. They are not criminals.”