Uptick in immigration related detainments
New data shows more than 65,000 people have been detained by federal immigration officers in the U.S. since the start of the fiscal year.
, Maine —
There’s been an uptick in immigration related detentions. New England representing 1.4% of the nationwide increase.
“Over the last year and a half it’s [been] an unprecedented amount of cases our office has had to deal with,” Todd Pomerleau, a Boston based immigration attorney, said.
He represented Olivia Andre, a 19-year-old asylum seeker in Portland who was detained at a facility in Texas for six months before her released.
He said under the Bush Administration, there were a lot of immigration arrests after 9/11, but arrests weren’t happening like this under other previous administrations.
“A lot of people weren’t getting detained like this, no. There was I think it was more targeted in the Trump was president the first time,” he said.
The data shows, as of this month, 65,765 people were in federal custody. 88.5% of them were arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and 11.5% of them were arrested by Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
The numbers also show that just last month, 43,138 people were in custody.
New England shares a small portion of those detained, with 905 people. No facilities in Maine show up in this data.
“February alone accounted for almost as many entire arrests as we had seen in the year before that in Maine,” Ruben Torres from the Maine Immigrant Rights Coalition said.
He added that immigrants and members of the community who call the coalition’s hotline say not only are detentions rising, Torres estimates they’ve doubled, but the areas in which people were being detained is changing.
He said this winter during Operation Catch of the Day it was happening in more populated areas of the state, then enforcement seemed to shift to more rural areas, before changing again.
“That shifted back as the seasons got warmer. Back to Maine are back to the more populated parts of Maine. And more of these tourists industry sectors,” Torres said.
Immigration rights groups say that many immigrants are concerned to be in public, given both the fatal shooting in Biddeford and the increase in detentions.