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All U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees held in the Portland jail were removed Thursday after Cumberland County Sheriff Kevin Joyce criticized the agency’s tactics in the arrest of a corrections recruit.
ICE told Joyce’s office it would be removing detainees shortly after Joyce’s news conference, Brian Pellerin, the sheriff’s No. 2, said Friday morning. The inmates were gone by 10 p.m. Thursday. Pellerin said ICE did not cite a reason for the move.
The jail has long held about 60 ICE detainees on any given day. Joyce’s office faced protests last year for holding inmates for the agency, which has been paying them $150 per day to board each inmate. The people held at the Portland jail are typically arrested in other states.
Some of the detainees have been moved to federal prisons in New Hampshire and Rhode Island, said Anna Welch, a University of Maine School of Law professor who runs a legal aid clinic working with detainees at the jail and described the process as “very chaotic.”
Joyce condemned ICE agents for “bush league” policing in the Wednesday arrest of his recruit, who was ripped from a car that was left running on a Portland street. At his news conference, he said the recruit had work authorization, passed background checks and had recently traveled to Texas to check in with immigration officials.
The sheriff, a Democrat with a low-key personality, described the actions of ICE agents as being in stark contrast to what he was told by Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” who said priorities were securing borders and arresting criminal immigrants.
“Clearly, their motives are a little different than what we’ve been told, or at least in this case,” Joyce said Thursday.
News of the detainees circulated quickly through the legal community between Thursday and Friday. Welch was unaware of when the moves began and whether they were related to the more than 100 arrests ICE has said it has made in Maine since the surge began Tuesday.
Fallout from ICE’s decision appeared to filter into the federal court system on Thursday, when U.S. Attorney Andrew Benson’s office requested permission Thursday to move a detainee being held there to an ICE facility in Boston. It was granted by District Court Judge John Woodcock Jr., who said in a decision that the jail had no more bed space.