In Portland, Maine, a liberal, normally laid-back city known for its coastal views and coffee shops, anxiety and anger were palpable on Thursday, the third day of a statewide surge in federal immigration enforcement.
On the wide brick sidewalks of the city’s Old Port district and the snow-lined streets of its West End, residents expressed their resistance to the crackdown, posting “No I.C.E.” signs in windows, filming traffic stops by masked agents and standing guard at school playgrounds. In the city of about 70,000, which in some ways resembles a small town, many residents said the operation felt like an assault on their peaceful neighborhoods.
“This is a close community, where everyone knows everyone, and it’s not a place anyone expected this to happen,” said Anny Fenton, a Portland resident. “It feels very surreal and intense.”
The immigration offensive began in Maine this week, the latest in a series of similar federal campaigns in Democrat-led cities across the country. Officials with the Department of Homeland Security said it was targeting 1,400 “criminal illegal aliens who have terrorized communities” in Maine.
Those detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents since the campaign began on Tuesday include a 64-year-old Lyft driver, whose son said all he knew about his father’s disappearance was what he saw in a bystander’s video of the traffic stop and arrest, and a corrections officer trainee, whose boss, Sheriff Kevin Joyce of Cumberland County, said the man had cleared background checks, had no criminal record and was working legally.
In Portland and in the smaller city of Lewiston, 30 miles to the north, residents scanned the streets for black S.U.V.s, their everyday routines infused with strange new vigilance. At a Petco store in suburban South Portland, near the Maine Mall, employees said ICE agents had repeatedly circled the parking lot in their vehicles on Thursday. In Portland’s Old Port, a tourist area dense with upscale shops and cafes, an owner of one restaurant said employees had observed agents there, too.
The restaurant owner declined to give his name, saying he had already endured days of harassment — including a flood of negative online reviews of his business — after posting a small “No I.C.E.” sign in the front window.
While Portland, like much of Southern Maine, is politically liberal, the state as a whole is more diverse, with particularly strong conservative leanings in its rural northern portion. President Trump won about 45 percent of the statewide vote in 2024.
Even in and around Portland, some residents said they welcomed the arrival of the federal officers, and of immigration enforcement that they considered long overdue.
Barry Askinasi, 70, shopping at a Home Depot in South Portland, said he had no problem with immigrants — he noted that he had raised a son whom he adopted from Guatemala — but “if you’re illegal, you shouldn’t be here.”
“It’s important to let ICE do its job,” he said. “We all pay our taxes. We can afford to take care of some people, but not everyone.”
If city and state leaders would cooperate with federal immigration authorities, Mr. Askinasi added, and help them “get the bad guys,” then ICE would not have to stake out neighborhoods.
Maine, one of the whitest states in the country, has proportionally fewer immigrants than most: people from other countries make up 4 percent of its population, compared with 14 percent of the U.S. population, according to a report last year by the Migration Policy Institute.
But in the sparsely populated state, which has 1.4 million people and an aging, shrinking work force, immigrants play an outsize role. About 45 percent of immigrants in Maine are of prime working age, 25 to 54, the report found, compared to 36 percent of residents born in the United States.
“Businesses are losing employees because they’ve been detained, or aren’t showing up, and they’re very worried about how they’re going to carry on — all kinds of businesses that rely on employees who are here lawfully,” Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat running for U.S. Senate, said at a news conference in Portland on Thursday.
Larger employers in the state quickly felt an impact from the surge, as workers who felt at risk of being detained, and fearful of going outside, chose to stay home this week. At Maine Medical Center in Portland, the state’s largest hospital, at least 18 staff members missed work on Tuesday night, according to a nurse who worked an overnight shift and was told by supervisors that fear of detainment was the main reason for the absences.
The nurse, who declined to be identified because the hospital had not authorized employees to describe staffing, said that most of the missing workers clean rooms. Their absence meant longer waits for patients to be moved from the emergency room into inpatient units.
The hospital’s patient caseload was also affected, a doctor on staff said. In at least one case, a resident of the Portland area whose home care aide was detained by ICE had to be admitted to receive care that would otherwise have been given at home. The doctor also declined to be identified because hospital employees were not authorized to speak to the news media.
“While we are experiencing higher than usual call-outs in some segments of our work force,” a hospital spokesman, John Porter, said in a statement, “we have been able to address any operational challenges that have arisen with no impact on patient care.”
In Lewiston, an old mill town of 37,000 where population decline was reversed in recent decades by a wave of African immigrants fleeing civil war in Somalia, the downtown was unusually quiet on Thursday, residents said.
Kevin Rockwell, 43, an employee at a staffing agency in Lewiston that hires immigrants for jobs including factory work, construction and cleaning after confirming that they can work legally, said some had called to say they could not work this week because they feared being swept up in the surge.
“I’m seeing less people come in looking for jobs,” he said. “Some people don’t even want to talk on the phone.”
Nsiona Nguizani, 42, of Portland, an immigrant from Angola, said even people who are citizens carry their documents while running errands for others because no one knows what agents might demand “so they’ll let you go.”
Fear, he said, is “everywhere.”
A traffic stop in Portland on Thursday morning, close to several administrative offices for the University of Southern Maine, startled employees, one of whom said she went outside and recorded video as bystanders screamed “Show your face!” at masked agents.
A man spotted later near the intersection, as the detained driver’s car was being towed away, identified himself as the son of the detainee. He declined to give his name, but said he was trying to contact a lawyer to assist his father, a 64-year-old Lyft driver in the city.
“He is not a criminal,” the man said. “That’s why I’m not worried.”
In a statement on Wednesday, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said the Maine operation is targeting “the worst of the worst,” including people convicted of aggravated assault, false imprisonment, and endangering the welfare of a child.
On Thursday, Maine’s governor questioned those claims, and said that many of the detainments she had heard about appeared to involve people with jobs, children in local schools and no criminal records.
“I’d be shocked if they found 1,400 people with criminal charges against them,” Ms. Mills said.
At her cafe in Portland’s West End neighborhood on Thursday morning, Ilma Lopez was busy greeting customers, baking cream puffs with caramel filling and navigating fallout from the “No I.C.E.” sign in her front window.
A Venezuelan immigrant who moved to Maine from New York 14 years ago because “people are so nice here,” she said she could not have imagined the atmosphere in her adopted city becoming fraught and fearful almost overnight.
“Immigrants are the backbone of the community, in every city,” Ms. Lopez said. “It’s a rare thing now to find someone who’s been here for generations.”
Sitting nearby at the coffee shop’s counter, Jeff Marcus, 40, a tour guide in the city, expressed a similar anger. “It’s disgusting in the general human sense,” he said of the immigration crackdown.
Another customer he had just met had offered to add Mr. Marcus to an online group of community activists who were tracking sightings of federal agents and documenting their actions. He had accepted the invitation.
“I’m furious,” he said, “and I’m tired of waiting around.”
Murray Carpenter and Sydney Cromwell contributed reporting from Lewiston, Maine.
Jenna Russell is the lead reporter covering New England for The Times. She is based near Boston.
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