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, but President Donald Trump’s administration issued a statement late Friday criticizing Joyce for hiring the recruit.
It became the latest flashpoint between the federal and local governments on the fourth day of the ICE surge into Maine. Joyce’s office faced protests last year for holding inmates for the agency. People held at the Portland jail have typically been arrested in other states.
ICE has been paying them $150 per day to board each inmate. 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.”
That followed Joyce’s Thursday condemnation of ICE agents for “bush league” policing in the arrest of his recruit, who was ripped a day earlier 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 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.
Joyce did not name the recruit, but the U.S. Department of Homeland Security identified him as Emanuel Ludovic Mbuangi Landila, an Angolan immigrant who entered the U.S. illegally via the southern border in 2019. That is common among African asylum seekers, but they are allowed to remain in the country and work while their asylum cases are active.
“We could not, in good conscience, continue to partner with a law enforcement organization that flagrantly violated our nation’s immigration laws,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the department, said in a statement.
Joyce has been outspoken about his office’s hiring of asylum seekers, and another corrections officer was detained by ICE last year. A York County corrections officer was also arrested this week during a routine appointment in Scarborough.
The news of the detainee move circulated 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 to move a detainee being held there to an ICE facility in Boston, citing a bed shortage. It was granted by District Court Judge John Woodcock Jr., who deferred to the government’s statement in his decision.