Is New England next in Trump's escalating war on blue states?

ICE plans attack on Maine's Somali community.

Julia Conley for Common Dreams

US Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino

Maine Gov. Janet Mills was among the leaders in the state who addressed reports late Wednesday that the Trump administration plans to send federal agents including those with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to cities such as Portland and Lewiston, and said unequivocally that the violence masked officers have unleashed on Minneapolis in recent days would not be welcome by residents and officials.

Mills said ICE had refused to confirm the reports that its agents would be in the state and what the basis for the operations would be, but MS Now reported Wednesday that the administration is considering sending federal officers to Maine.

Donald Trump mentioned Maine’s Somali community in a speech at the Detroit Economic Club; Somali people in Minnesota have been a top target of ICE’s activities there.

Maine’s Democratic governor said her administration was “taking proactive steps to prepare.”

“If any operations take place, our goal as always will be to protect the safety and the rights of the people of Maine,” said Mills. “Maine knows what good law enforcement looks like because our law enforcement are held to high professional standards... and they are accountable to the law. And I’ll tell you this, they don’t wear a mask to shield their identities and they don’t arrest people in order to fill a quota.”

“To the federal government I say this: If your plan is to come here to be provocative and to undermine the civil rights of Maine residents, do not be confused. Those tactics are not welcome here,” she said.

Mills said state police had been directed to work closely with local law enforcement in cities including Lewiston and Portland, where the police departments do not cooperate with ICE.

Reports of the potential deployment—which Portland Mayor Mark Dion denounced as a “paramilitary approach”—come days after a bill, LD 1971, became law and prohibited all state and local law enforcement from engaging in federal immigration enforcement activities.

“This new law will ensure Maine towns and cities are not complicit in or liable for federal abuses of power, and will improve public safety by building trust between local law enforcement and the communities they are supposed to serve,” said ACLU of Maine policy director Michael Kebede on Tuesday.

The bill passed into law without the signature of Mills, a Democrat who is running in the US Senate primary in hopes of unseating Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). The governor has been trailing Graham Platner, a progressive who has called for the “dismantling” of ICE, in recent polls.

“One of the reasons I want to go to the Senate is that when we have power again, I want to haul all of these people and the ones that made them do it in front of a Senate subcommittee, make them take their masks off,” Platner said in October.

Dion and Lewiston Mayor Carl Sheline, also a Democrat, urged residents and businesses to know their rights in case they are approached by federal immigration agents.

Dion emphasized in a statement Wednesday that “there is no evidence of unchecked criminal activity in our community requiring a disproportionate presence of federal agents.”

“In that view, Portland rejects the need for the deployment of ICE agents into our neighborhoods,” said the mayor, a Democrat.

President Donald Trump’s recent escalation of federal immigration enforcement in Minneapolis has led to an ICE agent’s killing of 37-year-old Renee Good, who had been observing the agents as people across Chicago, Charlotte, and other cities have over the past several months. A federal agent also shot and wounded a man during a traffic stop there on Wednesday.

Trump has largely been targeting the Somali population in Minnesota amid a social services fraud scandal in the state in which some Somali people have been charged and convicted. He has called for all Somali immigrants to leave the US. On Tuesday, Trump said that “Somali scams” had happened “in Maine, too.”

Maine has a significant Somali community including many people who have become US citizens; the population is largely centered in Lewiston and Portland.

MS Now reported that according to people familiar with the administration’s plan, immigration operations in Maine were “being designed to arrest and detain Somali refugees for reviews that could last around 30 days.”

The Maine Monitor reported that immigration authorities visited Lewiston last month and visited Gateway Community Services, a healthcare provider for immigrants that the state suspended payments to after it alleged more than $1 million in interpreter fraud.

Mills said Wednesday that she fully supported the right of Maine residents to protest a federal immigration enforcement operation and urged them to do so peacefully and “to meet any hostility with reserve and resolve.”

“I know there are more unanswered than answered questions right now,” she said. “We will continue seeking out answers and continue to communicate our information and plans with you in the coming days. But know this: Maine will not be intimidated, and we will not betray the values that make us who we are.”