White House Border Czar Tom Homan visited Maine’s northern border last week on the same day he promised a state lawmaker that immigration agencies would take “a lot more enforcement action” in the state.
White House spokesperson Lauren Bis confirmed Homan’s visit to the Bangor Daily News on Tuesday, but did not answer questions about the purpose of his trip or where he visited.
Homan’s appearance adds to a long list of visits to Maine by senior federal officials ahead of November’s midterm elections. Vice President JD Vance, House Speaker Mike Johnson, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, have all made stops in the state in August alone.
Homan dined at a Presque Isle restaurant on Aug. 18, according to witness accounts and a photo reviewed by the BDN. The biggest city in Maine’s northernmost county, Presque Isle is roughly 15 miles from the nearest Canadian border crossing in Fort Fairfield.
Earlier that day, Homan told attendees of a border seminar in Alexandria Bay, New York, that he was traveling to Maine to “find out what the hell is going on up there.”
“I’m going to Maine now to meet with the border patrol and the ICE folks … to find out what they need, to get more specifics on what the issues are so we can address them,” Homan said in an exchange with state Rep. Mike Soboleski, R-Phillips, that Soboleski later posted to Facebook.
The Maine Wire first reported that Homan was in Maine, but provided no additional details. U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement referred a reporter to the White House Press Office.
Homan told Soboleski that enforcement action would rise in Maine after a June Supreme Court ruling that cleared the way for the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitian and Syrian immigrants.
Under TPS, foreign nationals can remain in the U.S. when crises such as armed conflict or environmental disaster prevent them from returning home safely.
“A lot of TPS people in Maine,” Homan said in the video. “They’re not going to be there much longer either now that the Supreme Court said we can end TPS. There are hundreds of thousands of people we’re looking for now to remove, a lot of them in Maine.”
Of the approximately 1.3 million immigrants with TPS status in the U.S., only 715 live in Maine, according to data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Lisa Parisio, policy director of the Portland-based Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, called the administration’s efforts to strip TPS protections “cruel and unjustifiable.”
“TPS has been the law for decades,” Parisio said. “It is a life-saving humanitarian protection. Targeting TPS and TPS holders in Maine or anywhere in the country is senseless on a policy level, and will needlessly put lives at risk, separate families, and have ripple effects across workplaces and the economy.”
Hundreds of Haitian TPS holders in Maine are at risk of deportation, Parisio said. A bill co-sponsored by Maine Sen. Angus King currently the Senate would again designate TPS for Haiti. A House version of the bill passed earlier this year.
In his exchange with Homan, Soboleski said the Maine Office of New Americans — established in 2025 to integrate immigrants into Maine’s workforce — has brought “75,000 illegals” into the state.
“That’s what we deal with, trying to get rid of them,” the second-term representative said.
The figure Soboleski referenced likely refers to a target set in Maine’s 10-year economic development strategy plan, released in 2020, which said the state needed to add at least 75,000 workers in the next decade to address a workforce shortage created by Maine’s aging population. The plan cites “welcoming foreign immigrants” as one method to accomplish that goal.
Soboleski did not respond to a request for comment.
Maine’s population surpassed 1.4 million in 2025 as a direct result of domestic migration and foreign immigration. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates a net increase of more than 21,000 international migrants in the state from April 2020 to July of last year, roughly 27% of new residents.
“I know you guys took on a lot of refugees over the past few years. A lot under Joe Biden. And as you know we’re re-vetting all those refugees now,” Homan said in the video Soboleski shared.
Aroostook County has 13 of Maine’s 25 border crossings with Canada. The area has not previously been a target of large-scale immigration enforcement under the Trump administration. The January ICE surge in the state, dubbed “Operation Catch of the Day,” largely focused on southern Maine.