Politics
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Paul LePage said Monday that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is deporting a relative.
The Republican former governor who is running for Maine’s open 2nd Congressional District seat made the revelation in response to a question from a Portland Press Herald reporter during an event in Augusta, where LePage accepted an endorsement from Maine’s Fraternal Order of Police.
LePage told the reporter that his son’s father-in-law, who has a valid work permit, faces deportation because “certain people in Washington” don’t like the country he’s from, according to the Press Herald.
LePage didn’t identify the relative or say which country he is from.
He went on to say that ICE should focus its deportation efforts on gangsters and criminals.
“Would I go after everybody that’s here, that have work permits and have been here for decades? Probably not,” the Press Herald quoted LePage as saying.
At the same event, LePage also criticized the new state law limiting police cooperation with ICE agents.
Earlier this year, Maine became the latest state to see a surge in ICE agents as part of the Trump administration’s Operation Catch of the Day. That surge was cut short amid a nationwide pushback against the agency’s tactics following the fatal shootings of two protesters in Minneapolis.
Of the nearly 200 detained in Maine during the January ICE surge, only 11 had criminal convictions, undercutting the Trump administration’s claim that it was targeting the “worst of the worst.”
That trend continued into the summer. Of all the people ICE agents arrested in Maine between January and July, 68% had no criminal record.
ICE’s tactics came under renewed scrutiny in July, when an agent, identified as David Brouillette, shot and killed 25-year-old Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero as he left for work at the intersection of Pool and Hill streets in Biddeford, where Brouillette and another agent, neither of whom was wearing a body camera, attempted a traffic stop.
Brouillette was identified as the agent who pulled the trigger by his first ex-wife and relatives.
Guerrero, a Columbian who was in the country legally with his wife and young daughter, wasn’t actually the target of the agents’ administrative warrant.
It was at least the 11th fatal shooting involving ICE agents since Trump’s second inauguration. As of Sept. 1, at least 26 people have died in immigration detention centers this year, on top of 33 who died in 2025, according to the National Immigration Project.