New law limits when police in Maine can work with immigration enforcement agencies
A new law that takes effect Wednesday limits when state and local law enforcement agencies in Maine can work with federal immigration officials.
Police departments and sheriff’s offices will no longer be allowed to contact U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents for translation services if they encounter someone who doesn’t speak English, or relay personal information to federal officials unless it’s necessary for enforcing criminal laws.
Under the law, law enforcement agencies also can’t hold people for ICE, based solely on civil immigration enforcement. Jails, which are run by county sheriffs, will also be prohibited from notifying ICE about an inmate’s release date or honoring the federal agency’s detainer requests.
Immigrant rights advocates said the new law — in addition to two others that limit ICE arrests in housing, state healthcare facilities and schools — will improve trust in Maine officials and ensure public safety, regardless of immigration status.
“We want people to be trusting of government officials in cases of emergency,” said Michael Kebede, policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine. “And when our officials call Border Patrol, in an emergency, they undermine and erode public trust in law enforcement. I think it’s very important for people in law enforcement to understand that.”
Law enforcement leaders have opposed the new law. In a letter to the governor last year, urging her to veto the legislation, Maine Chiefs of Police Association President Scott Stewart said the proposed law would undermine public safety by “weakening partnerships, creating operational uncertainty, and exposing our communities to avoidable dangers.”
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Stewart, the police chief in Brunswick, warned that the Trump administration could punish Maine’s law enforcement agencies with funding cuts and increased enforcement if the legislation was allowed to take effect. He also referenced police departments that rely on Border Patrol for translation services.
Maine State Police announced in December that the agency would follow the new law early. MSP reported calling ICE and Border Patrol agents 63 times over a nine-and-a-half month span, from March to December 2025. Maj. Aaron Turcotte said in an email Tuesday that the agency is still following the new law and “there have been no issues since implementation.”
Several other cities, including Portland, Lewiston, Waterville and Rockland, have enacted their own laws limiting local police and other staff from communicating with ICE and Border Patrol.
RECENT CONTACTS
While some law enforcement agencies agreed to implement the law early, others have continued contacting Border Patrol after Gov. Janet Mills announced in December that she was going to let the law pass without her signature.
That includes an incident on July 19, when an Androscoggin County sheriff’s deputy encountered a van stuck in a ditch in Turner. The driver and a passenger showed him a passport and out-of-state driver’s permit, according to an incident report obtained through a public records request. The deputy said in the report that he wasn’t able to verify either identification through Maine records, so he called Border Patrol for help.
The deputy wrote that he called the agency “out of concern for public safety and to verify the legitimacy of the presented documents,” and to check that no one was listed in federal databases as a felon or gang member. The deputy also wrote that the two people waited with him after he dispatched for a towing company to help get the car out of the ditch.
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When a Border Patrol agent arrived, the deputy wrote in his report, the two people ran for the woods, in addition to another two people who showed up to help pay for the tow. He said the agent later told him that one of the individuals was supposed to leave the country in April.
Androscoggin Sheriff Eric Samson said in an interview on Tuesday that his staff didn’t help the federal agents chase the individuals and that they don’t know what happened to them. A spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection was not able to provide information on the status of the four people on Tuesday afternoon.
Samson said he believes the kind of communication his agency had with Border Patrol in this case will still be allowed under the new law.
“Oftentimes, when we can’t identify somebody, we’ll call them as a resource,” Sampson said. “I don’t believe that’s a communication that’s not allowed.”
Kebede, with the ACLU of Maine, said in an interview that there are provisions in the law that prohibit that kind of sharing of personal information with federal officials and detention transfers.
“I don’t know how much clearer this law can be,” Kebede said, adding that the men in Androscoggin County likely believed they were detained because there’s no mention in Smith’s report that they were told they could leave. Samson said the group was not considered detained by the sheriff’s office.
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“The ACLU spent a lot of time and effort trying to pass these laws,” Kebede said. “And we don’t want our efforts to fail, and one way our efforts might fail, is law enforcement agencies in Maine disregarding the language of the law.”
The example is one of several in the past year of local law enforcement agencies contacting Border Patrol. In South Paris, after police were called to a suicide attempt, a corporal called Border Patrol agents because he said he needed help translating what witnesses said. The federal agents arrested two Chinese men who had called for help.
In April and May, Franklin County sheriff’s deputies helped Border Patrol locate multiple people, and one deputy referred a caller to Border Patrol when she reported suspicions that her Airbnb tenants “sounded shady” and “were on the run,” according to records obtained by the ACLU of Maine.
OTHER NEW LAWS
The ACLU of Maine, Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, and civil legal aid provider Maine Equal Justice held a news conference on Tuesday about the new “ICE Out” laws.
Sue Roche, executive director for ILAP, said her organization was aware of more than 50 incidents in 2025 in which state and local police called immigration officials, resulting in arrests.
“The vast majority of people who have been handed over to ICE or Border Patrol by Maine’s law enforcement were people in lawful immigration processes who had no criminal record,” Roche said.
Ben Gaines, legal director at Maine Equal Justice, said a new “ICE Out of Our Homes” law will “protect renters from predatory landlords and rogue federal agents” by creating financial penalties for landlords who share tenants’ information with federal officials without their tenants’ consent.
During a surge in ICE arrests in Maine earlier this year, Gaines said his attorneys heard reports from several tenants whose landlords were threatening to report them to ICE for complaining about substandard living conditions. In one incident Gaines described, he said a landlord threatened to call ICE if a tenant didn’t vacate the premises, “without cause, notice, or the protections of Maine’s eviction law.”
A third law, focused on schools and state-run healthcare centers, requires employees to deny federal immigration agents access to private information and spaces without a judicial warrant.
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Tagged: ACLU of Maine, androscoggin county, border patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, LD 1971
Emily Allen covers courts for the Portland Press Herald. It's her favorite beat so far — before moving to Maine in 2022, she reported on a wide range of topics for public radio in West Virginia and was. More by Emily Allen
