Family members have been scrambling to learn the whereabouts of more than 200 people arrested during a federal immigration crackdown that has swept across Maine this week, immigration attorneys said, as federal authorities quickly ferried detainees out of the state.
“We were buried in phone calls,” said Jenny Beverly, an immigration attorney with Haven Immigration Law. She said her team worked long hours to locate detainees and stop their transfer out of Maine.
When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents transfer detainees out of state, they become even harder to reach and face greater odds of removal from the US, the attorneys said.
Most immigrants lost their first layer of legal protections in September, when the federal board of immigration appeals ruled that people who crossed the US border unlawfully are no longer eligible for release on bond, reversing years of legal precedent.
Now, lawyers are increasingly turning to habeas petitions, which make use of a detainees’ rights to challenge their detention, Beverly said. The catch is that these petitions must be filed in the same jurisdiction where a detainee is in custody. If a detainee is moved quickly, lawyers lose the opportunity to challenge their detention.
There are only a handful of lawyers who are trained to file habeas petitions in Maine, Beverly said, so an influx of requests could overwhelm the system.
“ICE came with the machinery in place to get people out of here as soon as possible. We are racing against the clock as soon as we get a phone call to get something filed,” Beverly said. “Frankly, I feel that enforcement was done [at this pace] on purpose so that we can’t keep up.”
Fifty immigrants were removed from the Cumberland county jail on Thursday, according to Kevin Joyce, the county sheriff. The two-story Portland jail has served as the state’s central detention hub during Trump’s second term.
Thursday’s mass removal followed a dispute between Joyce and the federal immigration agency after the sheriff criticized its tactics, calling it “bush league policing”.
When asked about the operations in Maine, Tricia McLaughlin, the DHS assistant secretary of public affairs, repeated a statement provided to the Guardian last week, saying that immigrants apprehended as part of a recent push were some of “the worst of the worst” and had been “charged and convicted of horrific crimes”.
With only two federal detention facilities in the state, Maine does not have the capacity to hold all 1,400 individuals that Patricia Hyde, deputy assistant director of ICE, said the agency intends to target.
The next closest holding facility, with larger capacity, is located in Burlington, Massachusetts. But data collected by Vera’s ICE Detention Trends shows that more than 45% of Maine’s detainees get transferred to Louisiana.
At least eight Maine residents have already been transferred to Louisiana, according to Maine’s Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project (ILAP). One man told his family that he is being held in a group of approximately 100 men, sleeping in tents next to or on an active tarmac, the group said in a statement.
More than 60 people have asked ILAP for emergency legal aid to prevent their removal since last week.
Non-profit groups like ILAP can provide this support free of charge. Beverly said that private firms likely charge “thousands”, which could be prohibitive, unless families can find financial aid.
“There are not adequate words to describe how difficult the past week has been,” Sue Roche, ILAP’s executive director, said in a statement. “In ILAP’s legal triage, we are seeing mostly people in lawful immigration processes with no criminal records being arrested. Many have been racially profiled and abducted from their cars off the street, and some have been targeted at home. ICE is stalking grocery stores and schools. The lack of due process or humanity in this enforcement operation is appalling.”
