On a residential street in Portland's Parkside neighborhood Wednesday afternoon, several residents honked car horns and blew whistles and airhorns as several ICE agents get into unmarked vehicles and pull off down the block.
It was unclear if the agents had arrested anyone.
A woman who gave her name only as Olivia said she lives nearby, and responded when she heard that ICE agents were in the area.
"Came out, walked around, found them. There are a lot of other folks out here with whistles and bull horns trying to alert folks," she said.
Olivia said she witnessed an immigration arrest earlier that day just up the block.
"I just feel like it's insane that this is allowed to be happening," she said.
The Department of Homeland Security confirmed Wednesday it is undertaking an enforcement operation in Maine, dubbed "Catch of the Day," saying it was focused on the "worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens."
The agency cited five examples of arrests, including one person convicted of an OUI.
An agency spokesperson did not immediately answer questions about how many people had been arrested, but Fox News reported Tuesday that officials said nearly 50 people had been detained so far.
Cassandra Linton, who runs a company that supports adults with developmental and intellectual disabilities, said one of the people arrested on the first day of the surge was one of her employees.
"One of our house managers had stepped out to go grab something to eat. He was on the phone with his friend when he was detained by ICE," she said.
Linton said the man, originally from Burundi, has a pending asylum claim and was working at her company's Saco location. According to ICE's online detainee locator system, he's currently being held at an ICE facility in Massachusetts.
Linton said the vast majority of her direct support professional employees are immigrants, who go through multiple rounds of screening.
"It's just a huge mess of fear for people who are here legally," Linton said. Her employee who was detained, she said "is legal. We've done all the checks. He is not a criminal, and he's just gone."
Now, Linton said, she's also concerned about what would happen to her clients, some of whom are nonverbal, should their caregiver be arrested while they're out in public.
Another arrest was an Angolan man living in Portland taken into custody Tuesday during a routine ICE check-in in Scarborough, according to court records. Those filings say the man's family is not sure where he is, but believes he's still being held in Scarborough, and a federal judge has ordered ICE not to transfer him out of state.
The enforcement surge has elicited mixed reactions from Maine's elected leaders at the state and federal level, including from state Senate President Mattie Daughtry, a Democrat, who said the name of the operation itself is reason for concern.
"Language that compares people to fish to be caught and hauled in is dehumanizing and dangerous," Daughtry said in a statement, adding that "The rhetoric being used feels less like law enforcement and more like people are being hunted for sport."
Local officials in the cities experiencing what appears to be the brunt of ICE activity, including Portland, Lewiston, and Westbrook, were unified in their condemnation, with some of the harshest words coming from Portland city councilor Wes Pelletier.
"I want to be really clear, this is a war of terror that's being waged on our city by the federal government," Pelletier said. Speaking alongside fellow councilors at a press conference on Wednesday, he rejected the need for increased ICE activity in the first place.
"No one asked the federal government to come here," Pelletier said. "This is one of the safest cities in the country."
And as some immigrant advocacy groups warned families to stay home and Portland school officials report a drop in attendance districtwide, Pelletier said some locals are forming networks to deliver food and other necessities to those sheltering in place.
While the duration and intensity of the crackdown remain to be seen, ICE deputy assistant director Patricia Hyde told Fox News earlier this week her agency has a target list of 1,400 people in Maine. That would represent about 10% of all immigrants without permanent legal status in the state, according to figures from the Migration Policy Institute.
