More than 100 days into President Donald Trump’s new administration, it’s clear he has made good on his campaign pledge to crack down on immigration, even in states such as Maine that are far from the southwest border.
Just in April, the Houlton Sector of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which covers all of Maine, arrested 113 “illegal aliens” from 16 countries, marking the sector’s highest number of arrests in a single month in nearly 24 years, the agency said in a recent release. The majority were migrants already living in the U.S.
Federal authorities have shared few other details about their drastically stepped-up enforcement even as stories of immigrants getting arrested have flooded social media and members of the public have grown increasingly alarmed about the administration’s heavy hand.
But a clearer picture is starting to emerge about some of the broad ways in which immigration enforcement appears to be changing.
While the number of people illegally crossing over the borders appears to have fallen in recent months — including between Canada and Maine — those undocumented immigrants already living and working in places such as the Northeast now face more danger of arrest and removal from the country.
That’s mostly because Trump, from the early days of his new administration, has issued a series of immigration-related executive orders and encouraged expedited removals without hearings, according to a Department of Justice notice filed in the federal register on Jan. 21.
Even those immigrants with appropriate documentation awaiting immigration or permanent residency procedures face greater risk of detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, according to Austin Kocher, a researcher and assistant professor at Syracuse University who has studied immigration data for 15 years.
“It’s not necessarily safe anymore,” Kocher said. “A lot of people who used to be safe are no longer safe.”
Here’s how immigration enforcement is changing in Maine and across the country, and what generally happens when immigrants are arrested in Maine.
Fewer border crossings
While it’s hard to get clear data that shows recent trends in federal immigration enforcement, especially at the state level, figures released by ICE and Customs and Border Protection provide some clues.
In general, fewer people are trying to enter the country illegally, including from Canada, and Customs and Border Enforcement says it is making more arrests in the interior of Maine.
In its press release about the uptick in arrests in April, the agency noted that “This increase in apprehensions is not the result of more people illegally crossing the border in Maine, but instead from expanded United States Border Patrol enforcement throughout the state.”
The agency is also on pace to double the number of encounters it has with immigrants in Maine. Just during the first half of this fiscal year, the Houlton Sector reported 357 encounters, which is a broader category of enforcement than arrests. At that rate, the agency could end up with some 700 encounters this year, compared to 344 during all of last year.
On the national level, that trend comes as CBP has reported a 95 percent drop in the rate of daily attempted border crossings on the southern border between last year and this year.
The Migration Policy Institute attributes this decline to the fear created by Trump’s more than 175 immigration-related executive orders and U.S. travel warnings issued by Canada, China and several European countries to nationals.
According to Kocher, the border is effectively closed.
More people getting removed from the country
Another outcome of the Trump administration’s executive orders on border enforcement is that far more immigrants already in the U.S. are now getting detained and set up for removal, with ICE detentions skyrocketing nationally from 12,094 in all of fiscal year 2024 to nearly 50,000 just for the first half of fiscal year 2025
In fact, that uptick has not extended to ICE’s New England region, which includes Maine. The region had just 702 detentions in the first half of fiscal year 2025, compared to 3,048 for all of 2024. ICE’s fiscal year runs from October through September.
But a larger portion of the people swept up in those arrests in New England have recently been getting sent out of the country. Of those 702 detainees, 659 were removed, or 94 percent, according to ICE data. In all of 2024, 73 percent were removed from the region.
Another change this year is that undocumented people with no criminal history are more vulnerable to getting arrested, with 21,250 out of 49,005 — 43.4 percent — held in ICE detention having no criminal record, according to the federal immigration data collected as of May 4 by a Syracuse University research center called Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC. That’s up from 28 percent last year.
How are people getting arrested in Maine
There are different groups within the Department of Homeland Security that carry out immigration enforcement and have the ability to deport people they’ve arrested.
Customs and Border Protection includes agents who mainly focus on the areas around the borders, while ICE and Enforcement and Removal Operations are the department’s investigative and enforcement arms.
CBP officials have not responded to requests for detailed information about recent arrests and detentions, including the names of people who have been taken into custody, making it hard to learn more about the process.
But some recent cases have provided a glimpse into how it can work, often because federal agencies have promoted the arrests themselves, or they have come under outside scrutiny because of the role that local law enforcement played in them.
In recent weeks, CBP agents have made arrests in places such as Houlton, Calais, Madawaska, Rangeley, Montville, Brunswick and Augusta — often following minor traffic stops.
In one attention-grabbing case from late February, Lewiston resident Jose Adalberto Herrera, 17, and his uncle were turned over to CBP following a Maine State Police traffic stop, the BDN reported. Herrera, who came to the U.S. as an unaccompanied minor in 2019, was sent to a New York City detention facility, more than 300 miles away from his mother who also lives in Maine.
In another case last week, Baltazar Alonzo-Perez, 32, of Guatemala, was picked up in Bangor as part of a 10-day CBP sweep across Maine that led to 39 arrests. He’d previously been removed from the country while living in Texas.
Earlier in May, several border patrol agents searched, handcuffed and arrested five Ecuadorians at a convenience store in Caribou, according to video shared by CBP that was set to a pounding Van Halen track.
What happens after someone is arrested in Maine
When CBP arrests someone on immigration-related charges, agents generally transport them to one of six border patrol stations in Calais, Fort Fairfield, Houlton, Jackman, Rangeley or Van Buren.
They’re then processed and put in a holding cell, often while waiting for a branch of ICE to begin removal proceedings, CBP officials told reporters at an event in March. For the most part, detainees are then placed in jails that serve as detention centers in New Hampshire, Massachusetts or Maine, often on a 48-hour hold, before deportation.
Because of the recent increase in arrests by the Houlton Sector, ICE removal operations had to transfer 29 people lodged in Portland on May 11 to other parts of the country for further processing, CBP said in its press release.
But, it appears that numerous local jails in Maine have been at least somewhat involved in holding detained immigrants.
Two Bridges Regional Jail in Wiscasset and Cumberland County Jail in Portland are official ICE detention centers. In April, the Cumberland County Jail was holding 80 people for ICE, up from 45 in March. There were only three detainees at the facility at the same time last year, according to TRAC data. Two Bridges Regional Jail has been detaining up to 25 in recent months, compared to two last year.
Additionally, Franklin County Jail in Farmington had 63 detainees from January through March, with most in and out within 48 hours, according to information released by the Maine chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union following a request under Maine’s Freedom of Access Act.
A federal lawsuit has shined light on the case of Richard Sanipatin, a 27-year-old asylum seeker who has alleged that he was unlawfully arrested by police in Rangeley before being detained by CBP and then jailed in Franklin County following a traffic stop in February. In his petition, Sanipatin argues that he was denied access to his legal counsel in March.
Since then, he was transferred to a county jail in Dover, New Hampshire, and on May 9, a federal judge dismissed his case and he was transferred to New Mexico, where he is being held at an ICE facility.
In April, Hancock County Jail detained a Chinese man on a 48-hour hold for Homeland Security before removal. In the same month, York County Jail had four inmates with ICE detainers, according to documents obtained by the Maine ACLU.
Court bottlenecks
Although each case is different, some immigrants arrested in Maine may be detained for months or even years. Others are released with a date for an immigration court hearing, or sent back into the community after providing the required documentation, Houlton Sector border patrol agents said in March.
There are currently 8,215 people with Maine addresses waiting for a hearing in New England’s immigration court in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, according to data collected by TRAC. Some have been waiting for 600 to 800 days for their cases to be resolved. More than 100 Maine towns or cities — spread across every county — have residents with pending immigration cases.
But some of them may never get that hearing, according to Kocher.
“One of the things now, the judges are closing out some cases before they even come to court for a hearing,” he said. “ICE can pick them up.”
