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A federal agent fired paintball-like projectiles at the cars of at least two people observing them in a Home Depot parking lot on Friday, marking one of the most dramatic confrontations between officers and the public since Maine’s immigration surge began last week.
It happened when the onlookers did not immediately leave an area of a South Portland parking lot where about six agents had gathered, according to two witnesses who recounted the episode in interviews. The projectiles left sticky, orange marks on their windshields, bumpers and car doors, they said, providing photos and videos to corroborate their accounts.
One video shows a group of about six officers approaching several vehicles in the lot. Two of them held rifles and one of them held a device that resembled a paintball gun. It is not clear what kind of threat the onlookers presented that would have justified the agent’s use of force.
The confrontation at the South Portland Home Depot last Friday afternoon is the first documented time during the Maine operation that agents have used crowd control weapons to deter public surveillance, underscoring the tension between those who say they are exercising their free-speech rights and agents who have warned them not to impede their work.
“I was not threatening them. I was yelling obscenities, but I was 50 feet away in my car with the window open and they came after me with guns and threatened to arrest me,” said Sabine Peirce of Portland, who said an agent fired at her sedan while they said she needed to leave because she was impeding federal law enforcement and could be arrested.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not respond to inquiries about the encounter. The incident was reported later that evening to a tip line operated by the Maine Immigrant Rights Coalition. Video taken by another driver was posted to a website that tracks sightings of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement across the country.
Peirce had driven to the Home Depot around 4 p.m. on Friday after witnessing an agent arrest a man about a half-mile away, near the Maine Mall. She was driving one of about four cars that approached a group of agents near the back of the lot by the service entrance.
One of the other drivers, Joshua Reynolds of New Hampshire, said that agents first approached an older woman driving a white Volkswagen who had gotten closest to the officers. They appeared to say something to her, then an agent shot projectiles at her car. Reynolds assumed they might be pepper balls, which are deployed from devices that resemble paintball guns and release a powdery irritant. But these projectiles left a liquid mark, similar to drying glue, he said.
Travis Norton, a former police lieutenant in California and use-of-force expert, said he had never encountered paintballs used by law enforcement. Federal agents have used pepper ball guns among other “less lethal weapons” during intensifying enforcement actions across the country during President Donald Trump’s second term, according to Bellingcat.
When agents shot at the windshield and bumper of Reynolds’ car, he crept further toward them, he said. At that point, two officers approached with handguns drawn at their sides, he said.
Reynolds said he backed off quickly, pulling over a curb, when an agent approached his window and issued him a warning that spooked him, making him think of the case of an ICE officer who fatally shot a woman in her car earlier this month in Minneapolis. (A border patrol agent fatally shot a man trying to film officers there on Saturday.)
Reynolds did not immediately leave. He took another picture of the agents walking toward the cars, including two agents holding long guns against their chests. Both he and Peirce said they left soon after, after the agents had coaxed them back into the front of the Home Depot parking lot. Reynolds said that onlookers, presumably Home Depot customers, had stopped to watch and some appeared to be recording with their phones.
After leaving Home Depot, Peirce drove back to the Maine Mall area and called the event into a local hotline that is tracking ICE around Maine. A hotline representative confirmed her report.
“The goal has been to be peaceful and to document and show them … that the world is watching,” Peirce said. “There are eyes on them.”