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Five cooks who were arrested after federal immigration agents targeted a pair of Japanese restaurants in southern Maine last month had legal permission to work in the U.S., their attorney argued in court.
The arrests took place during the height of a massive immigration enforcement operation in Maine last month and has strained the Kobe Japanese Restaurant chain, which has struggled to hire cooks, an attorney for the men said during an immigration court hearing on Monday.
Federal agents appeared to target employees of the chain’s South Portland and Biddeford locations during last month’s surge even though they had passed a federal audit last summer, the lawyer argued. The chain could be the Maine business hit hardest by enhanced immigration enforcement during the second term of President Donald Trump.
“The owner received the audit back that all of his employees had property authorization, had been vetted to continue working,” Kira Gagarin, a lawyer the restaurant hired to represent the five men, said during a bond hearing for one of them in immigration court on Monday in Chelmsford, Massachusetts.
A manager for Kobe told the Portland Press Herald, which first reported the arrests, said that agents arrested employees before the restaurants opened at 11 a.m. Five men— three from China, one from Indonesia and one from Nicaragua — challenged their detentions in a Boston federal court, according to documents reviewed by the Bangor Daily News.
Border Patrol agents approached the men outside of their workplaces and detained them for no apparent reason, according to their court petitions. All of them had pending asylum applications and work permits, mirroring a pattern among the immigrants that federal agents arrested during the Maine surge.
All five men were expected to receive bond hearings in immigration court this week. On Monday morning, a judge granted one of the men a $2,000 bond, siding with his attorney’s request for a minimal bond. A lawyer for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security argued the man should be denied bond because he was a flight risk.
Gagarin, the attorney for the cooks, declined to discuss the cases, saying Kobe’s owner, who had retained her, did not wish to comment on the detentions. But during the Monday morning bond hearing, she described the situation as “one of the very many frustrating cases these days” and suggested it had hurt the restaurant’s business.
“[The owner] submitted a letter [to immigration court] showing how in Maine, it is very hard to fill these positions and his restaurants are not able to function without these chefs,” Gagarin told the court.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Border Patrol, did not respond to a request for comment.
In June 2025, Border Patrol agents raided Kobe’s third location in Bangor and arrested three people. Those arrests were not referenced in immigration court on Monday.