A federal judge late Wednesday ordered the release of a Venezuelan man detained as part of an apparent larger immigration enforcement action targeting agricultural workers in Skowhegan earlier this week.

U.S. District Judge Stacey D. Neumann ordered the man, identified in court filings by the initials B.A.R., be released from a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility in Fort Fairfield by 9:30 p.m. She later extended the release deadline until 12:30 a.m. Thursday.

Neumann also ordered that a bond hearing for the man be held within 30 days and prohibited the federal government from detaining him prior to the hearing. The U.S. attorney’s office in Maine must update Neumann within 45 days on the status of the case.

The man’s attorney, Jenny Beverly of Haven Immigration Law in Portland, declined to answer questions Thursday morning, including whether her client had been released as ordered. Beverly said aspects of the case were still pending.

Neumann’s order came hours after Beverly filed a petition in U.S. District Court in Bangor for writ of habeas corpus, challenging the legality of her client’s detention.

In a brief response to the petition Wednesday afternoon, the Maine U.S. attorney’s office offered little argument against the release request.

The response, filed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Lizotte, acknowledged several other cases in which judges in Maine ruled in favor of petitioners in similar cases.

“The position of CBP nonetheless remains that (B.A.R.) must be detained pending the outcome of his removal proceedings,” Lizotte wrote, citing precedent from an immigration court appeal.

Neumann in her order noted the government’s acknowledgement of past rulings and said it “has not submitted any additional facts or legal arguments explaining why B.A.R.’s case is factually or legally distinct from those cases.”

A slew of similar petitions have been filed in Maine’s federal courts amid the recent increase in immigration enforcement operations in Maine, dubbed “Operation Catch of the Day,” that officials said resulted in the arrests of more than 200 people. Attorneys across the country have argued that the Justice Department, which oversees immigration courts, is not granting bond hearings to those detained.

B.A.R. has the status of an “unaccompanied alien child,” according to his petition. Lizotte’s response challenged that claim, saying B.A.R. is at least 18 years old now. Beverly declined to provide her client’s age.

The law defines an unaccompanied alien child as someone younger than 18 with no lawful immigration status and no parent or legal guardian in the country able to provide care and physical custody.

B.A.R. entered the U.S. in September 2023, and Homeland Security detained him shortly after, the petition states. Because he was a minor, Homeland Security transferred him to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, according to the petition.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement released B.A.R. in December 2023, according to a heavily redacted document attached to the petition. 

B.A.R. was taken into custody Tuesday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection after agents with CBP stopped a bus in Skowhegan, the petition states. The brief description of the detention in the petition appears to match a reported operation by the U.S. Border Patrol in Skowhegan early Tuesday morning.

Federal authorities have released little information about the enforcement activity despite repeated inquiries. It is unclear how many people were detained and where they were being held.

A regional spokesperson for CBP said he was awaiting approval from senior officials before releasing any information. Skowhegan police Chief David Bucknam confirmed the Border Patrol was leading it.

Agents took all 17 workers on a bus heading from a former motel in Skowhegan to Backyard Farms greenhouses in Madison, said bus driver Roland Joyce, of Poland’s Bus Service in Skowhegan.

Joyce said agents stopped the bus at 5:20 a.m., just after he pulled out of the former motel on West Front Street. Agents initially took one man into custody before speaking with the others, Joyce said.

Donn Poland, who owns the bus company, said those on the bus work at the Backyard Farms greenhouses in Madison. His company has provided transportation for both Backyard Farms workers, in the country on H-2A visas for temporary agricultural work, and employees of a Michigan-based contractor, Martinez and Sons, who work at Backyard Farms.

Poland’s company was transporting those detained Tuesday on behalf of Martinez and Sons, not Backyard Farms, he said.

A spokesperson for Backyard Farms’s Canadian parent company, Mastronardi Produce Ltd., said in a brief statement Tuesday that workers who did not show up at the Madison plant that day were not Backyard Farms employees.

Backyard Farms has not responded to several follow-up inquiries. Several calls to Martinez and Sons were not answered this week.

U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican who announced that Homeland Security’s “Operation Catch of the Day” was ending after just a week in late January, said Tuesday’s detentions were not an indication of another wave of enforcement in the state.

Her office was in touch with Homeland Security officials, who indicated the raid was “part of a targeted operation that has been ongoing for years and does not represent a resumption of the enhanced operations that ICE was conducting in Maine,” Collins’ spokesperson Blake Kernen said in a statement Wednesday.

Staff writers Emily Allen, Rachel Ohm and Rachel Estabrook contributed to this story.