U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees held in the Portland jail have started to be removed, according to a lawyer and federal court filings.
It is unclear whether the federal government or Cumberland County Sheriff Kevin Joyce’s office initiated the removals. U.S. Attorney Andrew Benson’s office requested permission Thursday to move a detainee being held there to an ICE facility in Boston. It was granted by District Court Judge John Woodcock Jr., who said in a decision that the jail had no more bed space.
News of the moves came shortly after Joyce held a Thursday news conference criticizing agents for their arrest of a county corrections recruit. He was ripped from his vehicle and detained a day earlier as part of ICE’s surge into Maine.
The removals appeared to be sudden. The jail holds about 60 ICE detainees on any given day. Some of the detainees have been moved to federal prisons in New Hampshire and Rhode Island, said Anna Welch, a University of Maine School of Law professor who runs a legal aid clinic working with detainees at the jail.
“We work closely with immigrants at [the jail] and are quite surprised by this turn of events,” she said.
Neither Joyce’s office nor ICE and other federal agencies responded to questions about the moves on Friday morning. A spokesperson for Benson’s office pointed a reporter to the court filing.
Welch did not know when detainees started to be moved, describing the process as “very chaotic.” The people held at the Portland jail have typically been arrested by ICE outside of Maine.
Joyce’s office faced protests last year for holding inmates for ICE. Several people arrested in Maine in recent days have been sent to a jail in Massachusetts.
On Thursday, Joyce condemned ICE agents for “bush league” policing in the arrest of his recruit, whose car was left running on a Portland street. He described the actions of ICE agents as being in stark contrast to what he was told by Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” who said ICE’s priorities were securing borders and getting criminal immigrants off the street.
“Clearly, their motives are a little different than what we’ve been told, or at least in this case,” Joyce said Thursday.
