The detention earlier this month of a parent outside a public school in Portland by unidentified agents in unmarked cars highlighted how U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is choosing to operate, right now, and how powerless we can be rendered in the face of those activities.

Condemnation of the lack of transparency in this case was forthcoming from the usual quarters.

Rep. Chellie Pingree, in a letter to the acting director of ICE, demanded a “full accounting of this operation, including which agencies were involved, what coordination occurred between these agencies, and the justification for selecting the school as a location for enforcement.”

Portland City Council unanimously passed a resolution condemning the arrest. Separately, Mayor Mark Dion, once a sheriff, expressed his concerns (“Why are federal agents able to escape that basic responsibility that democratic policing expects?”).

The chair of the school board, Sarah Lentz, said in a statement that the board’s role was “to provide free, appropriate education to every student, regardless of the identities that they hold, and this interrupted that and created substantial harm within our community. And it is not welcome.”

This is all well and good. It’s also not nearly enough.

If Maine wishes to send a clear message, to move the needle at all, it needs to assume a united front against the cavalier maneuvers of ICE. Since Donald Trump took office, immigration arrests have more than doubled in Maine and 37 other states.

So far, the collective response has been incoherent.

Consider that the aggrieved city council that issued a formal statement raising concerns about dignity, public trust and community safety is the same city council that, just weeks prior, signed a federal grant agreement for upgrades at Portland International Jetport that mandates cooperation with ICE. Assessing the contract and the national legal picture, lawyers for the city said they don’t expect Portland will be required to work with the agency.

The obvious difficulty with this expectation is that, given the secrecy that shrouds the work of an emboldened and lavishly financed ICE, we may never be able to establish exactly where cooperation with its crackdown begins and ends. Dion had to take extra steps to reassure concerned residents because the decision to sign the contract was made in executive session, behind closed doors.

At a naturalization ceremony in Portland last Wednesday, Gov. Janet Mills declined to comment on the public school detention. The tension of this time, however, cannot be lost on her. A reporter noted the governor appeared to be fighting back tears as she observed: “It always a very emotional and inspiring ceremony.”

Mills is well able to swim against the tide and the governor should be doing so, wherever possible, on the subject of ICE and its practices. Pushing for the governor to sign into law LD 1971 (a bill passed by the House and the Senate in June), the terms of which Mills ultimately found too broad, an August letter writer expressed his impatience.

“This is a strategy that aims to inspire fear in immigrants and in the American population at large. It’s putting boots on the ground in every state, in an unprecedented show of force that belies the stated purpose of getting immigration under control,” read the letter. “Where is the governor’s ‘I’ll see you in court’ resolve that Mainers need and deserve in these fraught times?”

Writing in May on the subject of local police departments’ contracts with ICE — popular nationally but, so far, unpopular here in Maine — this editorial board commended the towns of Wells, Winthrop and Monmouth for withdrawing or pausing their departments’ undertakings to accept work that ICE delegates.

“The upside for ICE, here, is crystal clear,” we wrote. “The potential benefit to our local authorities is murky, at best, and best avoided as a result.”

We see now that there may be “upsides” in the absence of a clear and firm approach to ICE that insists on transparency and other run-of-the-mill terms and conditions. It falls to Maine’s local, regional and state leaders to do what they can to forge that, together, as soon as possible.