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The Department of Homeland Security says immigration agents arrested more than 200 people in Maine in the span of a few days last month. Now some of them are getting out on bond. Maine Public's Ari Snider reports.
ARI SNIDER, BYLINE: One evening in late January, Delfino Nsuka says about half a dozen ICE officers pulled him over on his way home from work as a FedEx driver. Nsuka is an asylum-seeker from Angola, who lives in central Maine. He says he showed officers his driver license, work permit and Social Security card. Nsuka says the agents arrested him anyway.
DELFINO NSUKA: I was very scared but, you know, I'm just praying, you know, and just hoping God just protect me.
SNIDER: Nsuka was swiftly transferred out of state to a detention facility in Massachusetts. ICE has shared very little about the people it arrested in Maine last month, but like Nsuka, many were asylum-seekers with no criminal records, according to lawyers, family members and employers. Robin Nice, an immigration lawyer in Boston, is representing six asylum-seeker clients from Maine arrested during the surge last month. She says ICE technically does have the authority to detain people with pending asylum claims but historically hasn't done so.
ROBIN NICE: Now, all of a sudden, everyone is fair game.
SNIDER: Nice says this new approach isn't always standing up in court. Three of her Maine clients have already been released, and the other three have upcoming bond hearings. But she says the seemingly random nature of who was arrested in the first place could be a Trump administration tactic to push people toward self-deporting.
NICE: Scare people into giving up and to make people think that it's going to be too hard or that they will arbitrarily be picked up and forced to leave.
SNIDER: To force the government to grant her clients' bond hearings, Nice filed what's known as a habeas corpus petition in federal court, challenging the basis of their detentions. It's part of a national flood of similar cases. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison told a Senate committee last week that prosecutors in his state were drowning under a flood of habeas corpus petitions. One analysis by a federal judge in New York found immigrants are prevailing in the vast majority of these cases. Some Maine residents are finding similar results, says Shaan Chatterjee, another Massachusetts-based immigration attorney. In two recent cases, he says the government barely challenged his motion seeking bond hearings.
SHAAN CHATTERJEE: The government's attorneys didn't even really file oppositions. They were more just waving the white flag.
SNIDER: Unless there's a change in circumstances such as involvement in a criminal case, Chatterjee says ICE should be less likely to redetain those clients. A DHS spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment about recently arrested immigrants in Maine being released on bond or whether they might be picked up again.
CHATTERJEE: But it's not impossible. You know, I mean, I think these days, we're seeing that ICE is capable of just about anything.
SNIDER: It's a fear that still hangs over Delfino Nsuka, the Angolan asylum-seeker in Lewiston. He was released on bond after 15 days in ICE custody. His lawyer, Sahra Hassan, said in an email that Nsuka had a few key factors working in his favor. He originally entered the country on a visa, making it easier to seek bond. He has no criminal record, and he's married to an American citizen, offering another potential pathway to permanent status. Still, Nsuka, who's lived in Maine since he was a teenager, says being suddenly picked up by ICE has destabilized his sense of belonging.
NSUKA: 'Cause I feel like I'm not wanted here or something, you know. Like, that's how I feel deep down.
SNIDER: Like many of those arrested during the ICE surge, Nsuka says he's confused about why he was picked up to begin with. He says his focus has always been working, providing for his family and following a legal immigration pathway toward asylum. He says he plans to get back to work for FedEx next week.
For NPR News, I'm Ari Snider in Portland, Maine.
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