Colleagues and community groups are pushing back on recent immigrant detentions in Portland as arrests nationwide hit a Trump-era high.  

Federal agents detained a Cambodian man on Tuesday while he was working at Veranda Asian Market. Earlier this month, agents detained a Portland Public Schools transportation employee. These detentions are in addition to others outside court and at the jetport in recent weeks.

Over the past year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has grown its staff by 44% in Maine, the first significant growth in the state in at least a decade, according to an analysis by the Portland Press Herald. 

Across the country, ICE arrests have been on the rise, reaching the highest on record in July. This increase has come as the White House pushes for the agency to meet a new target of 2,000 arrests per day, roughly double the pace from earlier this year. 

Many of these arrests have not been through dramatic sweeps or large-scale operations, like the one in Maine in January, but instead conducted more quietly during everyday encounters. 

For example, federal agents went into Veranda Asian Market around 9 a.m. Tuesday and asked to speak with the Cambodian man outside before detaining him, according to Marpheen Chann, executive director of Khmer Maine. Chann declined to share the man’s name.

Meanwhile, Simao Paulo, the van driver and bus assistant for Portland Public Schools who is originally from Angola, was arrested on Aug. 4 after Canadian border agents turned him over to U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Champlain, NY, according to a DHS spokesperson who said he was issued a final order of removal in July. 

“His detention by immigration enforcement has done nothing to make our community safer and makes it harder for our district to ensure transportation is available for all eligible students,” the school district shared in a statement. The Benefit Association of School Employees and the Portland Education Association have called for his release. 

Paulo’s detention is at least the second employee of the school district detained by ICE this year. Agents detained Micheline Ntumba, a facilities staffer, in January after she dropped one of her children off at Portland High School. A father of an elementary student was also detained outside Gerald E. Talbot Community School last September. 

The majority of the immigrants detained across the country continue to have no criminal convictions, contradicting the Trump administration’s continued statements that federal immigration agencies are targeting “the worst of the worst.” 

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