Immigration enforcement in Maine mostly fell out of the national limelight after federal agencies concluded their five-day surge here at the end of January. But those efforts continued in the months after, morphing as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security changed hands.
Immigrants’ rights advocates say they’ve seen more activity from federal immigration authorities in residential areas in the last few months, typically involving arrests near people’s homes or while they’re on the way to and from work.
One group, the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, reported an uptick in detentions in the last two months. Before May, the organization responded on average to five detentions per week, according to Ruben Torres, its advocacy and policy manager. Since then, that figure has doubled to about eight to 10 per week, he said.
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent’s fatal shooting on Monday of Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian immigrant, highlights the agency’s continued presence in Maine since the highly publicized surge. It also puts a spotlight on ICE’s shifting tactics in what was meant to be a broader national strategy of arresting more people through quieter operations.
“Immigration enforcement has been at high levels since the beginning of 2025 to now, both before and after the January ICE operation,” Lisa Parisio, the policy director for the Portland-based Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, said. “Enforcement did not stop after that.”
The most recent publicly available data on ICE arrests in Maine, published by the Deportation Data Project based at UC Berkeley and UCLA, shows a steep drop in arrests from 206 in January to 33 in February.
That followed an uptick during 2025, when ICE averaged 28 arrests in Maine per month, compared with 14 per month in the year before President Donald Trump began his second term.
It’s unclear exactly how many people ICE has arrested in Maine since February, as the agency does not publish that data, but internal documents obtained by The New York Times showed a nationwide surge at the end of June when immigration officials arrested more than 10,000 people in five days. ICE arrests have roughly doubled from about 1,000 to 2,000 per day since the beginning of this year.
The Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition saw what seemed to be a “retreat” into rural parts of the state by federal immigration agencies following the statewide January surge dubbed Operation Catch of the Day, Torres said.
Rural immigration operations in the state have included arrests of Ecuadorian roofers in small towns like Rangeley and Winthrop, raids of vans taking agricultural laborers to work near Skowhegan in February and the June arrest of the owner of Friendship’s sole store in the town of 1,142 people.
More recently, Torres has seen activity returning to more populated areas.
For the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, which is the only statewide immigration legal services organization, caseloads have been more consistent, according to Parisio, who said she’s noticed more ICE activity coinciding with a dropoff in Border Patrol activity. That shift began after January but has been especially pronounced in recent months, she said.
That comes after a boost in funding for ICE and the appointment of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who promised to carry out more discreet arrests following chaotic practices under former secretary Kristi Noem, including the weekslong operation in Minnesota when federal immigration agents killed two U.S. citizens. ICE officials were informed of a 2,000 arrest per day quota, The New York Times reported.
In Maine, the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project responds to arrests “every single day,” Parisio said.
Last year, many of those cases involved state or local police pulling people over for traffic stops, then calling in Border Patrol, she said. That trend led to a new state law banning local cooperation with federal immigration agencies that is set to go into effect at the end of July.
There’s no indication that any local or state police officers were involved in the leadup to Monday’s shooting, but the passage of the law underscores Mainers’ concerns around how the Trump administration is detaining people without violent criminal records.
Parisio said she’s still seeing some arrests related to traffic stops, but also a lot of people arrested near their homes. Many of those people are asylum seekers who came to the U.S. legally on visas and have no criminal record, she said.
Only 11 of the nearly 200 people arrested during Maine’s January enforcement surge had criminal convictions, undercutting the federal government’s claim that agents targeted the “worst of the worst” criminals.
Federal enforcement activities have remained mostly focused on the southern half of the state in areas like Biddeford, Portland, Lewiston and Auburn, according to Parisio.
Adrian Arias-Palomo, executive director of the Brewer-based Maine Multicultural Center, said he hasn’t observed so much enforcement in Greater Bangor, “at least at the level that we were fearing,” even in the last few weeks.
The most high-profile raid in Bangor occurred more than a year ago, when Border Patrol agents raided a Japanese restaurant and arrested three people.
While he’s only worked for the organization for about five years, Arias-Palomo reported that volunteers and staff who have been there for longer tell him that immigration enforcement in the Bangor area was more aggressive during President Donald Trump’s first administration.
Still, he said his group has been getting calls from local residents who are scared to leave their houses over concerns about ICE.
“It’s come as a shock for the immigrant community, just as like the rest of the state, that this could happen in Maine,” he said of the fatal shooting in southern Maine.
Guerrero’s death came just days after an ICE agent killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, the 10th person fatally shot by immigration officials during Trump’s second term. Neither Guerrero nor Araujo were ICE’s intended targets, and both shootings occurred during traffic stops.
ICE agents have since been told to end most vehicle stops, Fox News reported Tuesday.
“This escalation of violence that happened in Biddeford obviously is not an isolated incident, in the country or here,” Parisio said.
Beyond any rising enforcement itself, the current federal administration has brought a shift in tactics, including arresting immigrants with legal status and no criminal background as well as implementing arrest quotas, which Parisio called “new and unique to this administration.”
Tuesday’s report that ICE would pause most vehicle stops after the shooting in Biddeford could be a sign of cracks in Mullin’s hopes to achieve Trump’s goals of boosting arrests through subtler methods. Protests sprung up across the state mere hours after the killing as far north as Bangor.
“I think the sentiment that was felt yesterday is that this will not stand in Maine,” Torres said.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly noted Guerrero’s age. He was 25 when he was fatally shot.