Laura Anderson’s nightmare began outside a toll plaza in Portland where Border Patrol arrested her fiancé, Lucas Segóbia, during a traffic stop.

It took days for Anderson to find out where they took him, even as she and her friends spent hours calling border officials and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“They’re trying to exhaust us,” Anderson, who lives in Searsport, told the Press Herald in an interview last month.

After a week of him being shuffled between two Maine jails and a Border Patrol site in Aroostook County, Anderson said, she learned that Segóbia was flown more than 2,000 miles to an immigration detention center in Texas near San Antonio.

Lawyers and experts say this is happening increasingly often across the country as the Trump administration expands deportation efforts: ICE detainees are swiftly being moved between local jails and prisons, many ending up hundreds or thousands of miles away. Some lawyers say people are often moved without notice. ICE says in its policy they will notify detainees and their attorneys about transfers, but the agency is not required to alert others, including family members.

Some immigration advocates and attorneys worry these transfers are a tactic to separate them from their clients and sabotage their cases.

A Homeland Security spokesperson recently told The Associated Press they were working to “get the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens off of America’s streets,” following President Donald Trump’s promise to scale back ICE arrests at farms, restaurants and hotels. It appears that guidance has been reversed, according to reporting from the Washington Post Monday.

Meanwhile, families are left wondering how to ensure their loved ones are safe.

As of June 1, more than 51,000 people were being held by ICE nationally, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, a nonpartisan data research organization at Syracuse University that tracks immigration records. The data indicates tens of thousands of detainees are being held at facilities across the south, in states like Texas, where ICE has greater capacity.

Anna Welch, a professor and director of the University of Maine School of Law’s Refugee and Human Rights Clinic, said immigrants living in Maine have ended up at ICE processing and staging centers in Louisiana, Indiana, Texas and Colorado, as well as a federal prison in Berlin, New Hampshire.

“We’ve talked to folks who were woken up in the middle of the night,” she said, “to find they were being rounded up and not knowing where they’re being taken to.”

The clinic has identified 208 people who have been moved from the Cumberland County Jail in Portland this year, at least 70 of them out of state, but Welch said they don’t know how many were released, deported or sent to another facility.

“It’s just this constant movement of people,” she said.

ICE’s media office did not respond to requests to discuss its transfer policy.

Cumberland County Sheriff Kevin Joyce, who oversees the jail, couldn’t confirm those movements; he has previously said he has no role in the federal agency’s decision making and where detainees end up. He said the jail has held a total of 265 ICE detainees since Jan. 1.

At a county commissioners’ meeting Monday, Joyce said the jail was holding 60 people for ICE.

Several pending lawsuits across the country claim there have been intentional efforts to isolate ICE detainees in remote places.

In one petition filed in Maine, attorney Melissa Brennan described a “pattern and practice” by ICE of moving immigrants all over the country, even if it means moving them away from their lawyers.

“We routinely see in my office … noncitizens who are moved, sometimes even the day of the hearing,” Brennan told a federal judge during a recent hearing in Portland. “This is a very real threat.”

UNUSUAL TREND

When ICE sent Rümeysa Öztürk, an international student at Tufts University, to an immigration detention facility in Louisiana, the agency said it was because they didn’t have any bedspace in New England.

But, Welch said, at the time Öztürk was arrested on March 25, there were at least 16 beds available at the Cumberland County Jail, just 100 miles from where she was first arrested on a street in Somerville, Massachusetts.

“Throughout my years of experience working with the immigrant population in northern New England, I have never heard of an ICE detainee being arrested in Massachusetts and being transferred to Methuen, MA; Lebanon, NH; and then St. Albans, VT; in a matter of hours,” she wrote in court records for Öztürk’s case, referring to the other locations the student had been held before being sent to Louisiana.

Welch and other lawyers who spoke with the Press Herald say this amount of shuffling was unusual before Trump took office.

ICE has always been able to move detainees between jails and states, particularly in New England, where several states share a field office and immigration court in Massachusetts. But cases like Segóbia’s are a “shift from what used to happen,” said Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-1st District.

“In the past, there wouldn’t have been these random traffic stops where people were then ending up in Texas or something else,” Pingree said.

Pingree said her office hears “almost every day” from people whose loved ones have been taken by ICE and they don’t know where they have been sent. She confirmed her staff helped Anderson track down Segóbia, who is being held at the Karnes Immigration Processing Center in Texas — something Pingree said they have done for several other Mainers who haven’t had luck reaching out to ICE directly or using the agency’s online case tracker.

Welch said she is also alarmed by the number of people ICE has sent to Maine jails from other states.

As of June 12, Welch said, two-thirds of the ICE detainees at the Cumberland County Jail were from other East Coast states, most in New England. She said her clinic has been meeting with and monitoring detainees in Portland and Wiscasset since January.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Lizotte, who has represented ICE in court, said the agency has always routinely moved detainees around New England states, including Maine, which has become a regular stop on their way to immigration court proceedings.

“ICE policy permits moving detainees outside the state of Maine to any of those other states, or from any of those states to Maine,” Lizotte wrote in an email.

But Welch said she’s also noticed detainees at the Cumberland County Jail who have come from as far away as Virginia and New York.

Lizotte said those decisions depend on multiple factors besides physical distance, “including facility overcrowding, the detainee’s individual circumstances and risk factors, or the location of the removal proceeding.”

‘OPERATIONALLY NECESSARY’

Several immigration rights advocates who spoke with the Press Herald also said they were alarmed by who has been detained and transferred by ICE.

“Many of these people had valid work permits, were in lawful processes, and had no criminal records,” Sue Roche, director of the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, a nonprofit group based in Maine, said in a written statement.

Since March, ILAP has followed news coverage of more than a dozen minor traffic stops across the state, where nearly 30 people have been handed over to immigration officers, according to the group’s spokesperson.

Roche said these cases include those where Border Patrol was called to arrest someone who wasn’t the initial target of the stop, including “people who were passengers in cars, someone who stopped to help someone who had been in a car accident, and someone who showed up to help pick up a car at a traffic stop.”

That includes Segóbia’s case, which started when a Maine State Police trooper pulled him and his friend, Marcos Henrique, over in Portland for a license plate issue.

Shannon Moss, a spokesperson for the state police, said the trooper couldn’t see the plate, which was “mounted unusually low and far to the right” and that the license plate’s lights “were inoperable.”

Moss did not respond to emails about why Border Patrol was called, but a spokesperson for the federal agency said it was to help verify the men’s identities.

The debate around ICE’s power to move people across states and facilities has made its way into federal court.

That includes the case of Gedeon Mboko, whose attorney filed a petition in U.S. District Court seeking an order preventing ICE from moving him out of Maine. 

Mboko arrived in the United States in 2019 as a teenager from the Democratic Republic of Congo. He said in court records that he had left the Democratic Republic of Congo and came to the United States after watching his friends die at the hands of police while participating in peaceful protest.

Now 23, he has been in ICE’s custody since May after finishing a brief sentence at the Cumberland County Jail. Police said he was under the influence while working at a group home last November.

At a hearing in federal court earlier this month, Mboko’s attorney, Melissa Brennan, said his lawyers in Maine have invested “hundreds of working hours” representing him pro bono. They can’t afford to follow him if he’s moved.

Lizotte, the assistant U.S. attorney representing ICE, said in court that the agency doesn’t intend to move Mboko unless it becomes “operationally necessary” due to constraints like bed space or overcrowding.

A judge rejected Brennan’s petition Tuesday, citing the government’s position, but said he could file a new petition in her court if he’s actually moved.

“Should the risk of transfer become concrete or should ICE transfer Mr. Mboko despite the Government’s assurances to the contrary, Mr. Mboko is free to return to this Court to seek appropriate relief,” U.S. District Judge Nancy Torresen wrote in her order.

Before Torresen issued her decision, Brennan filed statements from three other Maine-based immigration lawyers saying their clients were moved “very suddenly, without notice to the detainees themselves, their families, or their attorneys.”

Their clients, they wrote, were sent as far as Texas and New Mexico.

‘HE WILL HAVE A DAY IN COURT’

Welch, from the Refugee and Human Rights Clinic, has questioned whether the jails are just another cog in a massive apparatus being built under the Trump administration as it works to deputize more local law enforcement agencies to enforce immigration laws.

Joyce, the Cumberland County sheriff, said ICE doesn’t share information about transfers with him. He said he couldn’t comment on why ICE is moving people around, because he doesn’t know.

There could be a number of operational reasons for why detainees are transferred to and from Maine, Joyce said. There might criminal co-defendants who need to be kept apart, or people facing behavioral issues that might be better addressed at another facility, he said.

“Anecdotally, if ICE is doing it to mess with people, I have a problem with that,” Joyce said. “But I don’t know their rationale for doing it. … But, again, I’m not privy to what they know, what they have, nor do I want to be, because I don’t have time for it.”

The jail only recently got its contract back with the U.S. Marshals Service after the Cumberland County Commission voted to renew it in April 2024. The jail lost that contract in 2022 due to staffing shortages, leading to a nearly $1 million shortfall in the jail’s budget.

Welch is generally opposed to the civil detention of immigrants. If people are going to be held, she said, she would rather see them detained where they live, with access to their lawyers, rather than being shuffled “like cattle.”

In the last six months, she said her clinic has met with a Maine resident who was arrested by ICE in late February and transferred to Texas within a week and another who was detained in March sent to Louisiana two weeks later.

“I think the question is, when does this rise to a due process violation?” Welch said. “And I think we’re looking at a number of trends that should raise alarm bells to the courts and the community.”

To Laura Anderson, whose fiancé Lucas Segóbia is still near San Antonio, ICE “is trying to put all blocks on due process.”

Anderson said Segóbia had been in the process of legally becoming a U.S. citizen when he was taken into custody. Now, she says, their immediate focus is getting a bond hearing with an immigration judge in Massachusetts so Segóbia can come back to Maine.

“He will have a day in court,” Anderson said. “How long will it be? I don’t know.”

Staff Writer Morgan Womack contributed to this report.