Several advocacy groups who have opposed increased immigration enforcement in Maine say they’re launching a hotline to track activity by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers throughout the state.
The Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and other community partners say they have struggled to respond as more and more people are reporting ICE and Border Patrol sightings, many of which they say are hard to verify and create fear in immigrant communities.
Crystal Cron from Presente! Maine, one of the groups involved in the effort, said the hotline will create an accurate accounting of where immigration officials are working and will also connect people affected by enforcement to legal resources.
Cron said they’ve trained more than 100 people around the state to take reports that come to the hotline about arrests and other ICE-related activity, and then to go out and visit the sites where ICE was reported so they can document what they see.
The information collected through the hotline will help attorneys and policy advocates get a better grasp on increased ICE and Border Patrol activities throughout the state, Cron said, particularly in situations where she believes local law enforcement agencies have been inviting immigration authorities to traffic stops involving immigrants.
The Maine group hopes to eventually release a public impact report, like organizers have done in other states. Cron said they modeled the Maine hotline with input from providers in Massachusetts in North Carolina, where a hotline has been operating since 2018.
“The more that these agencies know a community is going to be there and witness and document, that might improve some enforcement activities,” Cron said in an interview Tuesday.
The coalition also launched a resource hub online with information on legal services and relief funds for families whose breadwinners were arrested by ICE.
Anna Welch, director of the Refugee and Human Rights Clinic at the University of Maine School of Law, said she hopes the hotline will combat the fear and confusion that immigrants in the state are experiencing. Welch said the clinic has held more than 300 legal consultations with ICE detainees in Maine jails and that clients often have questions about their basic rights and what will happen to their families.
“There’s just so much confusion, there’s just so much misinformation,” Welch said Monday.
Aside from news reports and rumors, such arrests have been a struggle to track. Dozens of incidents in Maine have come to light only because they involved local law enforcement agencies.
Family and loved ones of those arrested by ICE have also had a hard time finding people during the government shutdown, according to reporting from the Boston Globe.
U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-1st District, said her office has been trying to help some of these families for months and that U.S. Customs and Border Protection — whose agents carry out many immigration arrests in Maine — has refused to create its own locator service to report where it is holding people in its custody, unlike ICE.
“In the wake of the Administration’s sweeping edict to dramatically ramp up enforcement and detainment operations, some of these tools — including ICE’s own detainee locator system — have become unreliable,” Pingree said in a written statement Monday.
A spokesperson for the ICE field office serving Maine referred a reporter to previous statements that the Department of Homeland Security’s leaders have made regarding hotlines in other states, some of which Secretary Kristi Noem has suggested “looks like obstruction of justice.”
Noem was not commenting specifically on the Maine program. Cron said volunteers have been trained only to document what they see, not to get involved.
“We’ve been really thoughtful about training and making sure that people are equipped to go into the field,” Cron said. “It’s not to intervene or to escalate, but simply to keep an eye on our community and keep everyone safe.”
The Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, which offers legal help and advocacy to immigrants in Maine, says it has been trying to keep up with arrests involving local law enforcement officers.
Spokesperson Lisa Parisio said ILAP is not involved in the hotline, nor could she comment yet on what impact it might have.
But Parisio said ILAP can also attest to the lack of information. Not only is there no centralized tracking system for ICE arrests, Parisio said, but fear among immigrants and ICE’s practice of arresting people and sending them out of state has also made getting information harder.
ILAP is aware of 22 incidents in Maine involving state and local police in which more than 50 people have been taken by immigration officials. Parisio said ILAP has received but not been able to verify several other reports.
“What is known shows a concerning and broad pattern of Maine law enforcement agencies across the state stepping outside of their roles and voluntarily diverting Maine’s resources to assist the federal administration with indiscriminate immigration enforcement, threatening the rights and safety of some of Maine’s most vulnerable residents,” Parisio said.
Editor’s note: This story was updated Oct. 28 to include an interview with Crystal Cron from Presente! Maine.
