ICE got ‘quieter’ - then killed a father in Maine. Now watch groups are shifting their tactics too

Most of the time, the scene outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in the small, coastal town of Scarborough, Maine, could be confused for a nature watch in “Vacationland”, the slogan on state license plates.

People sitting in lawn chairs under a tent. Birds chirping. The sound of the breeze moving through the trees.

But when four Escalades zoom into the ICE facility parking lot on an August afternoon, the group springs out of their chairs, binoculars and clipboards in hand. Some rapidly call out license plate numbers, makes and models, while another scribbles the information down. This is what monitoring ICE operations looks like in the east coast’s most sparsely populated state: documenting the agency’s unmarked vehicles and keeping a record of detainments – the people arriving for routine appointments or brought in by agents and never seen leaving.

ICE-watching – following, documenting and alerting neighbors to federal immigration agents’ public activities – is a longtime, constitutionally protected practice that became more popular in response to the Trump administration’s ramping up of violent, on-the-ground immigration-enforcement operations last year. It particularly drew attention in Minneapolis in January, when neighbors came out in droves to record and interfere as agents pulled people out of cars, off sidewalks and from bus stops. Though ICE has shifted to less visible tactics since the start of the year, the number of immigration arrests is higher than ever, including in rural and suburban areas, such as much of Maine. ICE observers are still there, too – albeit exhausted and burned out.

In many of the US’s largest cities, immigrant rights networks count hundreds if not thousands of volunteers, and dozens of neighborhood-based encrypted chats and organizations activate on short notice.

But in areas like this one in Maine, organizers mobilizing against ICE’s deportation machine are often spread out and strapped for resources. The Maine Immigrant Rights Coalition (MIRC), a small non-profit representing more than 100 state-based organizations, estimates it has about 100 trained, regular volunteers on its roster. Some days, ICE-watching in the state is just three people in lawn chairs scrawling license plate numbers in their notebooks.

“People are trying the best they can – learning and utilizing new skills, and responding to crises in community – and then there’s another one, and there’s another one, and there’s another one,” said Crystal Cron, co-founder and executive director of Presente! Maine, a Latino-led organization that has given out about $200,000 in bond money for immigrants in detention every month since Donald Trump retook office.

But the work is never-ending, she said: “That is what the escalating violence is meant to do – it’s meant to exhaust us and confuse us.”

Recovering from an ICE surge

ICE-watching efforts in Maine ramped up in January, when the Trump administration launched Operation Catch of the Day, an intense crackdown on undocumented residents named in reference to the state’s $600m fishing industry that’s powered in part by migrant labor. In a state with a population a third of the size of the city of Los Angeles and where immigrants make up roughly 4% of residents, 100 people were arrested in three days, the majority of whom had no criminal records and were lawfully in the US.

Masked agents smashed car windows to abduct drivers, then abandoned the vehicles – and at least once, with a mother and baby inside – on the side of the road; children watched agents detain their parents from their front steps.

It “shocked the whole system”, said Mufalo Chitam, executive director of the MIRC. “The tactic was much faster than the traditional system that we had envisioned. By the time somebody can call [in a sighting], somebody’s already been picked up.’”

Residents and local community groups in the state came together, following ICE vehicles and dropping off groceries for immigrant neighbors too scared to leave their homes.

The operation lasted for nine days, and soon after, public backlash over ICE violence across the US reached new heights. The killing of two ICE observers in Minneapolis sparked widespread protests and intensified scrutiny of the administration. Trump replaced Department of Homeland Security (DHS) leadership, directing ICE to adopt “a little bit of a softer touch”. But while agents have become less visible in public, in Maine they never went away.

In July, an ICE agent killed 25-year-old father Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero during a traffic stop in Biddeford, 15 minutes from Scarborough. This happened just days after an agent killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Texas, also during a traffic stop. Any illusion of ICE’s “softer touch” was shattered.

Organizers’ ICE-watching hotline received 128 calls the week that Durán was killed, according to MIRC’s Chitam. People in Biddeford once again took to the streets and elected officials demanded an investigation.

This time, though, already-traumatized and outraged residents felt pushed to the brink, organizers said. Many of the state’s immigrants have been effectively sheltering in place for the last nine months.

“The death of Johan has been devastating, but for us it was not a surprise,” said Cron. “Our communities have always been under threat of persecution. Being hunted in the streets is not new.”

Organizers had been preparing for this moment. Last October, the MIRC and other community groups such as the People’s Coalition for Safety and Justice launched their hotline to report ICE sightings. The MIRC also built a network of volunteers who could speak the many languages reflected in Maine’s immigrant population – Somali, Haitian Creole, Arabic – coordinated via the encrypted app Signal.

Since then, the MIRC’s handful of staffers have been triaging between state offices, other policy organizations and community members – from assisting business owners protecting immigrant employees to lobbying elected officials on what resources they need. In May, the MIRC and Presente! created Lighthouse ME, an online “immigrant defense hub” that includes ICE arrest data and a visual tracker of sightings.

To hold ICE accountable, the Maine chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union recently launched a hotline to report first amendment violations. During the operation ICE agents followed observers home to intimidate them, fired pepper balls at their cars and told residents they would be added to a “domestic terrorist” list. Those residents and other observers have since launched a federal class action lawsuit against the DHS.

“The constitution guarantees your right to observe and record law enforcement agents when they’re doing their job in public. And yet the government keeps finding new ways to try to interfere with people’s first amendment rights,” said Zach Heiden, chief counsel at the ACLU of Maine. “But if bringing a lawsuit is necessary, then that’s what we’re going to do, for as long as it takes.”

‘Anytime they’re here, we’re here’

While organizers in Maine and many other parts of the country have been stretched thin, ICE-watching remains robust in bigger cities, although the tactics are evolving.

In Chicago, a year after Operation Midway Blitz, ICE observers are still pounding the pavement, looking for agents and carrying whistles to alert their neighbors. But community support is now more focused on managing the trauma already suffered through planning cultural events and vigils.

While New York never saw the sweeping on-the-ground operations that Chicago, Maine or Minnesota did, the city’s large population is a boon for its ICE-watching network. A patchwork of non-profit organizations, longtime community organizing groups and mutual aid networks all support immigrant communities. Organizers with Hands Off NYC, which launched a year ago to organize against ICE, said there are at least hundreds of people who have taken know-your-rights training, offered online, in the last several months.

And yet despite Maine’s smaller ICE-fighting network, residents have already seen its impact on the state level: thirteen days after Durán’s killing, three “ICE Out” laws went into effect, blocking cooperation between the agency and local police forces, landlords, schools and state healthcare facilities.

Heiden, of the ACLU of Maine, observed that none of those laws would’ve saved Durán’s life, though. Many organizers said that much more needs to change to prevent another ICE killing. This weekend, residents plan to march 70 miles (113km) from the office of the senator Susan Collins in Biddeford to the state capital in protest of her support for ICE funding.

“Johan’s death is not an isolated tragedy. It is part of a system that has inflicted fear, separation, detention and death on immigrant communities,” Cron testified during a hearing in August. “The responsibility for his death, and the many deaths by immigration police and in ICE detention this year, is a collective one.”

And so residents continue to push for justice, accountability and structural change.

At a congressional “shadow hearing” in August – an unofficial proceeding hosted by the US representative Chellie Pingree investigating Durán’s killing – the Biddeford high school auditorium was packed with irate residents holding signs declaring “ICE = Terrorists, Democrat Silence = Complicity”.

When Durán’s parents walked in, a heavy hush fell over the room. Durán’s father, his voice thick with held-back tears, testified through an interpreter: “Our dream was always to be reunited and to hold each other again. Today that dream can no longer come true.”

On the same day, just 10 minutes away, another group of Mainers grieved and organized at Biddeford’s Mechanics Park. The site where French and Irish immigrants blocked the Ku Klux Klan from a planned march into Biddeford more than 100 years ago is now occupied by activists and an art installation – hundreds of ribbons tied to a fence with messages for Durán and the city’s immigrant residents. Nearby are stocks of snacks, Narcan, “know your rights” zines and 3D-printed whistles.

When a neighborhood kid drops by a tent and takes a free Gatorade from the cooler, he tells the person making “Fuck ICE” bracelets he’ll come back later. “We’ll be here,” she replies.

Meanwhile, at the Scarborough facility, observers say they’ve been seeing, on average, two detentions a day: people brought to the facility in shackles by ICE agents and people who arrive for appointments and never come back out, abandoning their cars. (Their estimate is borne out in DHS data monitored by the Guardian.) In their informal capacity, they have, at times, become the first line of support to dazed family members exiting the facility.

Still fresh in their minds is Jonas Manywa, a 42-year-old asylum seeker from the Democratic Republic of Congo who arrived at the facility for a routine appointment in early August. Agents arrested him in front of his two young daughters. When his wife came with their nine-month-old to pick up their children, she had his car keys but couldn’t drive. The crew of ICE-watching volunteers helped her figure out how to get home.

Most days, people stop by the tent at the Scarborough facility, dropping off water bottles and snacks for the volunteers and thanking them for their efforts. But even with this community support, it’s been difficult to recruit new volunteers.

“Now more than ever, we need people to join us to build a better, more free world,” said Cron.

Still, the organizers, volunteers and advocates making up Maine’s resistance to ICE will keep doing the work.

“Anytime they’re here,” one ICE observer said, looking at the Scarborough facility, “we’re here.”