SCARBOROUGH, Maine — On Sept. 28, at 8:19 a.m., two cars with black windows leave the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility at 40 Manson Libby Road.
Two people standing outside quickly jot down the license plate numbers and note the time.
“They’re going hunting,” one of them says.
At 8:21 a.m., five more cars suddenly appear, heading in the same direction.
The watchers scramble. On clipboards and yellow legal pads, they document everything ICE agents do, taking photos of the cars, shouting out license plate numbers, reaching for their pens. They mutter curses to themselves.
Then the alerts go out.
They have a meticulous information-gathering and distribution network, as they call it, in the southern Maine immigrant community. It’s a careful system that requires constant monitoring of ICE’s only facility in the state, a small, unassuming building on a quiet road near Route 1.
Residents across southern Maine have formed groups like this to monitor ICE activity — following federal vehicles, standing guard at school bus stops, filming agents, watching out for their immigrant neighbors — since the January enforcement surge in Maine.
But after an ICE agent killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford on July 13, many have intensified their efforts. And about five core watchers have made monitoring the ICE facility their full-time job.
They’re not protesting, they said, but they’re not just watching. They’re giving immigrants rides, buying groceries, watching their kids, driving people’s cars home after they’ve been detained, and connecting them with legal resources.
Two of those watchers agreed to speak with the Portland Press Herald about why they’re doing this work, but asked not to be fully identified out of fear for their safety. Others who followed and documented ICE activity in January reported being followed home by agents, intimidated and threatened with arrest.
The watch
For almost three months, K and Allisandra have spent about 10 to 14 hours a day watching the facility. On Sept. 28, Allisandra said she felt especially tired. She had been at the facility from 5 a.m. to around 7 p.m. for several days.
They are scrupulous, almost obsessive with their notetaking. They have to be, they said, lives are on the line.
They have a printed sheet with 39 license plates they’ve seen at the facility. They know if the cars are there, hidden behind a fence covered in black fabric, or if they’re out “hunting.”
On separate sheets, they track the immigrants who come in, and those who don’t come back out.
Age. Sex. Race. Height. Hair color. Clothing. Cars. Are they carrying an umbrella? A bag?
The watchers don’t know most of their names, whether they have a family or children waiting for them to come home, friends, a lawyer.
“If there’s nothing else that we can give people, we know what happened to them,” Allisandra said.
The numbers
In August, the group said they observed about 2 ½ detainments per day. That decreased to about 1.8 per day in September. Between both months, they observed 101 detainments.
Of those, they believe eight were arrested during routine check-ins.
“This is an every-day emergency,” K said, sitting in a lawn chair across from the facility last month. “ICE is detaining people every single day. People don’t realize it.”
ICE did not respond to requests for comment or questions about the number of people detained at the facility or about the watchers.
The numbers have been decreasing, the watchers said, not because there are fewer detainments, but because they believe ICE agents have increased efforts to conceal their operations.
Before a black mesh fence was installed around the facility a few weeks ago, the watchers could see detainees with shackles locked around their feet being brought inside the facility from SUVs with tinted windows.
Sometimes, they have seen cars come and go by driving over a small ditch. There often aren’t enough watchers to have someone stand guard by that area, so they don’t know how often cars leave that way or when.
A morning on the watch
There are about 10-12 check-ins at the facility every day, watchers said, usually between 8 and 11 a.m. On the morning of Sept. 28, a reporter witnessed 12 people walk in.
It was a rainy, gray day, the impacts of a fall nor’easter still lingering. But the watchers are always there, regardless of the weather.
Normally, they set up lawn chairs across the street. On rainy days, they work out of K’s car. Allisandra rolled down the window of the back seat to get a better look, regularly wiping the car door soaked from the rain pouring in.
Throughout the morning, immigrants waited outside in the rain, sometimes for half an hour. Watchers said they have seen sick and pregnant immigrants wait for hours.
Sometimes, people are inside for just a few minutes. When immigrants are inside for half an hour or more, the watchers start to worry.
That morning, an immigrant they knew went in for a check-in.
“Have you seen him come out yet?” Allisandra asked after half an hour, panicking. They called the man’s wife, promising to let her know as soon as he returned.
After 50 minutes, when he finally came back out, they waved to him frantically, sighing with relief.
Still, they worry that each check-in could mean another detainment.
“The fear just doesn’t end,” Allisandra said. “ICE says, ‘come back in a week, come back in a day.’”
When others they didn’t recognize left the building, Allisandra hurriedly ran out in the rain to hand them a printed list of resources.
K said she knows immigrant families with newborns who have never seen the outside of their house since the ride back from the hospital.
“One person detained means one family irreparably damaged,” K said.
“Why is this on us? We’re just a couple of weirdos sacrificing everything to be out here,” she added.
This story was originally published by the Maine Trust for Local News. Salomé Cloteaux can be reached at scloteaux@metln.org.