Just before 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Emily Lambdin was at work at Austin Street Brewery in Portland's Bayside neighborhood, when a commotion across the street caught her eye.
She said four unmarked vehicles had surrounded a car across the street, and about half a dozen officers wearing tactical vests and masks were wrestling a man out of the car. Lambdin began filming.
In the Lambdin's video, the man being detained can be heard shouting that he's a corrections officer for Cumberland County as the ICE agents handcuff him and put him in the back of an unmarked vehicle. Lambdin says it was all over in minutes.
"At no point did I hear them give any reason" for the detention, said Lambdin. "They never read him any rights that I could hear."
When the ICE agents departed, Lambdin said they left the man's car's idling on the side of the road. That drew a harsh response from Cumberland County Sheriff Kevin Joyce on Thursday.
"They left it right on the side of the street," Joyce said during a press conference. "Folks, that's bush league policing."
Joyce confirmed the man in the video was a corrections officer recruit at the county jail. Like all recruits, Joyce said the man, who he did not name, went through a rigorous, multilayered vetting process.
Joyce said he had legal authorization to work and no criminal record.
"Every indication we found is that this is, this was a squeaky clean individual that really hadn't done anything at all," he said.
After the arrest, Joyce said an ICE official told his office simply that the man was "illegal.”
"I come to a conclusion, I hope it's wrong, that if you're not a card carrying U.S. citizen in this country, then everybody is illegal," Joyce said.
In city after city across the country, from L.A. to Chicago to Minneapolis, the Department of Homeland Security has told a consistent story, that it was deploying legions of immigration agents to remove dangerous criminals. Earlier this week, the agency highlighted four people arrested in Maine during the current enforcement surge, calling them "the worst of the worst" based on their alleged criminal history.
U.S. Sen. Angus King said he's not convinced.
"These are four that they've given us," King said on Thursday. "One of them is an OUI, which I think few people would characterize as the worst of the worst."
In 2024, there were over 4,200 DUI arrests in Maine, according to the latest state crime report.
"Let's call this what this is. This is a large scale mass deportation effort," King said.
Anna Welch, director of the Refugee and Human Rights Clinic at the University of Maine School of Law, said what she's seeing so far in Maine fits with national trends. Over the last few months, the vast majority of newly-detained immigrants have no criminal record, according to researchers analyzing ICE data.
"Most of the people being arrested in Maine so far are not folks with criminal records. They are asylum seekers. They are people who have followed our immigration laws. They have applied for asylum. They have received work permits,” Welch said.
She said it's hard to get a full picture, because ICE is not sharing much information about who they're arresting and why.
But the Portland-based Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project reports seeing similar trends, saying in a written statement Thursday that many of the people arrested so far have no criminal record and are pursuing lawful immigration pathways.
And Welch aid the premise that immigrants are driving up crime rates in the U.S. has been repeatedly debunked.
"Study after study shows that immigrants are actually less likely to commit crimes than native-born U.S. citizens," she said.
In Maine, the latest state report find the crime rate fell for the fourth consecutive year in 2024, even as the state's immigrant population has grown steadily over the last two and a half decades.
Meanwhile, Cumberland County Sheriff Joyce said his office will conduct an internal investigation into the corrections officer arrested by ICE, and is asking the agency to share any reports related to the arrest.
Last year, at the beginning of the second Trump administration, Joyce said he and over a hundred sheriffs met with federal border tsar Tom Homan, who said his priorities ARE twofold: secure the border and arrest criminals.
"We're being told one story, which is totally different than what's occurring, or what occurred last night," Joyce said.
