The man shouted the same thing repeatedly as multiple federal agents in tactical vests ripped him from his car and shoved him into the back of one of four police vehicles that stopped him along a busy stretch of Portland’s Bayside neighborhood.
“I’m coming from work! What’s wrong?” he yelled to the four agents placing him under arrest, one of whom held a Taser while officers pulled him from the driver’s seat of his green sedan. “I work for Cumberland County! I’m a corrections officer!”
On Thursday, Cumberland County Sheriff Kevin Joyce blasted immigration authorities for the Wednesday night arrest of the man, whom the sheriff described as a jail recruit with a “squeaky clean” record with permission to work while seeking a path to citizenship. Agents left the man’s car running in the road after whisking him away, said Emily Lambdin, a brewery employee who filmed the arrest from across the street and shared a video with the Bangor Daily News.
President Donald Trump’s administration has said its Maine surge, dubbed “Operation Catch of the Day,” is aimed at the “worst of the worst” criminals. It has issued updates that single out detainees who fit that description. But the jail recruit is one of several examples of agents detaining people without a criminal record and with permission to work here.
The first three days of the operation suggest that it is far more indiscriminate and includes immigrants who had already been working with the federal government to obtain permanent permission to live here. A large number of Maine immigrants fall into this gray area in the immigration system and many have already been swept up by immigration authorities since Trump returned to office a year ago. They now find themselves at greater risk of detention.
“They are not checking and making sure the people they are arresting are bad people,” said Papy Bongino, a Congolese community leader who has been in touch with the families of people detained this week, including a mother whose 18-year-old son, a university student with a work permit, was arrested outside a grocery store on Wednesday, according to the Portland Press Herald.
Two Angolan men have challenged their detentions in court, including a worker at a home improvement store who was arrested during a routine check-in and won a Wednesday order from a federal judge blocking his removal from Maine. But he had already been taken to Massachusetts by that time, which could render the order moot.
Before dawn on that same day, ICE arrested another Angolan during a traffic stop even though he lacked a criminal history, had a valid work permit and had regularly checked in with the agency since 2019, according to a court petition filed Thursday seeking his release. Agents also arrested a civil engineer who was here on a work visa and does not have a criminal record on Thursday, the Maine Monitor reported.
A representative for ICE did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday afternoon. The Trump administration said in a Thursday update that 100 people have been arrested in the operation so far. The share of ICE detainees with no criminal record have surged from 6% last January — just after Trump took office for a second term — to 41% in December, according to the American Immigration Council.
Maine appeared to draw the Trump administration’s attention over immigration issues after reports of alleged health care fraud among businesses associated with the state’s Somali community bubbled up in the news late last year. That was not long after Minnesota federal prosecutors brought a major welfare fraud case primarily involving that state’s Somali population, prompting an aggressive immigration operation targeting Minneapolis.
The focus on Maine has brought the might of the federal government down on a state with one of the smallest immigrant populations in the country and where the vast majority are naturalized citizens or green card holders, according to an October report by the Migration Policy Institute.
Only 18% of the state’s immigrants do not have permanent legal authorization to be here, the report stated. That group includes many people in a “liminal” status, in which the government is aware of their presence because of their participation in programs that protect them from deportation or offer a path to a being here legally, such as asylum seekers who have often entered the country illegally but are pursuing legal status.
“Everyone we work with is known one way or another by the government because they have documents that were issued to them,” said Martha Stein, executive director of Hope Acts, a Portland organization that provided support to the region’s thousands of asylum seekers, most of them from African countries.
Last year, her organization worked with 3,000 clients, most often by helping them apply for work permits so they could support themselves, she said. Since Trump took office, about 55 of them have been detained, usually during routine check-in with ICE at their office in Scarborough, similar to what happened to the Angolan man this week. Stein said she was aware of others who have been detained that way since the immigration surge began.
“They are in a kind of, ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ position, because if they don’t go, then they’ve violated the terms [of the asylum process], they aren’t following the system and they could be put into immediately removal proceedings,” she said. “But if they do go, there is a good chance they will … go to their appointments and not leave.”
A spokesperson for U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, a Democrat from Maine’s 1st District, said the office has heard from dozens of worried employers across a range of economic sectors — including agriculture, retail, restaurants and food processing — about the impact that ramped up immigration enforcement has had on their businesses. All of the employers told Pingree’s office that employees were legal residents or seeking a path to legal status.
In the meantime, volunteers have been dropping off food and medicine to immigrants who are too afraid to go outside.
“We are scared to even go outside because they’re catching people,” Bongino said. “Whatever has happened since the 20th” — the first day of the crackdown — “it’s caused what I’m going to call a general panic.”
BDN writer Sawyer Loftus contributed reporting.
Callie Ferguson is the deputy investigations editor for Maine Focus, the BDN’s investigations team. She can be reached at cferguson@bangordailynews.com.