Scarborough family devastated after ICE detains father for the 2nd time
SCARBOROUGH — Six-year-old Ivana has back-to-school jitters.
Even though she loves math, she’s nervous about learning how to add and subtract digits in the thousands in second grade.
And she keeps having nightmares about immigration agents coming to arrest her.
“Me and my family were being separated into different jails like the one where Daddy is,” she said on Thursday.
It started when her father, Jonas Manywa, a 42-year-old immigrant from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was detained at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Scarborough.
It’s been 20 days since Ivana and her 3-year-old sister Eliana saw him — in handcuffs as an ICE agent shut an office door.
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They cried and tried to push their way into the room where he was being held after being detained during a routine check-in.
“I want daddy,” Eliana cried as she tried to open the door, her mother Alaise Seguro recounted in an interview in French a couple weeks later. “Daddy is inside. I want daddy.”
Jonas Manywa in Portland in June 2025. (Courtesy of Alaise Seguro)
Eliana was pulled away as she clung to her father’s neck. Manywa didn’t have a chance to say goodbye or drive Ivana to her first day of school on Monday.
Manywa was transferred to Plymouth County Correctional Facility in Massachusetts the same day. A judge is now giving ICE until Friday to prove it complied with regulations and that Manywa should not be immediately released, according to court documents.
If the judge decides he was improperly arrested, Manywa could come home. Or, he could be deported to Cameroon — a country he’s never been to — where he’s worried he’d be shot at the airport.
Manywa’s case is one of several reports of someone detained during a routine immigration appointment at the ICE processing facility in Scarborough. And it isn’t the first time he’s been detained, either.
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He was held for seven months after a drunken-driving charge. In the year in a half since, he said he’s cooperated with regular check-ins and was in the process of applying for asylum. Then ICE arrested him again without warning.
He will go wherever ICE chooses to deport him, he said, as long as it doesn’t put him at risk of the violence or death he came to the U.S. to escape. He wants to be granted a “fear interview,” or a chance to explain that he could face violence in Cameroon, too.
“They will kill me before I even arrive,” he said in French during a recent phone interview from the detention facility.
NAVIGATING THE PROCESS
A couple of years ago, a judge ruled that Manywa met the criteria for withholding of removal, a status often given to immigrants seeking asylum who have a nonviolent criminal record.
Under previous presidential administrations, people with this status were allowed to stay in the U.S. indefinitely because they couldn’t be deported to their home country. But the Trump administration changed the policy to consider deporting people under that status to a third country whose government is willing to take them.
Spokespeople for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for information about Manywa’s case, including why he was detained.
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Manywa has retained an attorney, Amelia Lynn Ritenour, who declined to comment on his case.
The presence of federal immigration enforcement in Maine surged at the beginning of the year, when more than 200 people were arrested in less than a week in what ICE dubbed “Operation Catch of the Day” — with a stated goal of detaining 1,400 people in Maine.
ICE has remained in the state. In June, immigration advocates reported a rising number of calls to a hotline and steadily climbing reports of enforcement and detentions.
It’s not clear how many people ICE has detained to date in Maine. Spokespeople for ICE did not immediately respond Monday to questions asking for that number.
This past year, ICE grew its Maine staff by 44%, and people continued to be picked up by federal agents on the street, at work or at home. In July, a newly recruited ICE agent in Biddeford shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, who didn’t have a criminal history and wasn’t the agents’ intended target.
Alaise Seguro and her children Ivana, 6, Eliana, 3, and 9-month-old Jaya at their home in Scarborough on Thursday. Jonas Manywa, Seguro’s husband and father of their children, was detained at the ICE facility in Scarborough earlier this month while there for a routine appointment with his two older daughters. (Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer)
Manywa and his family are Banyamulenge, a Tutsi minority ethnic group primarily from the South Kivu province.
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Thousands of civilians in the Democratic Republic of Congo were killed and hundreds of villages destroyed in a wave of violence that began in 2017. Local militias, joined by Burundian rebel groups with Rwandan support, have vowed to expel or eliminate this ethnic group, according to an article in The Conversation.
Manywa spoke out against the violence on social media and in the newspapers. He said he was arrested and kidnapped multiple times, and people threatened to kill him and his family every day.
They fled to the U.S. in 2022 when they secured a visa to treat Ivana’s left kidney. The family of three then started the asylum-seeking process, and Manywa’s two younger daughters were born in the U.S., making them citizens. Manywa’s case was separated from his wife’s and Ivana’s, who are still seeking asylum.
“At least I will live,” Manywa thought when he moved to the U.S. “At least my children will live.”
A SEPARATED FAMILY
Weeks after her father was detained, Ivana holds a small yellow wooden block in her palm while sitting on a leather couch in the family’s dimly lit living room. Her younger sister tracks her every movement.
“Bippity boppity boop,” Ivana says, making the block disappear by quickly tucking it between her shoulder blade and the couch cushion. Ivana feigns disbelief. Eliana giggles.
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“Magic,” Ivana says.
Their mother, Alaise Seguro, sobs next to them, pulling at her hair as her head hangs in her hands.
Alaise Seguro with her two eldest children Ivana, 6, Eliana, 3, at their home in Scarborough on Thursday. (Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer)
Seguro’s phone rests on the arm of the couch, her husband’s voice echoing on speaker.
They’re used to doing everything together, even bathing the children.
Now, he calls a few times a day: in the morning around 9:30, in the afternoon at 1 and 3 and in the evening around 8, an automated voice first announcing that an incarcerated individual is trying to place a call.
Manywa can talk in 30-minute increments, sometimes for up to an hour, listening to the kids playing in the background and asking his wife about them. At night, he sings to the girls, and tells them stories about his adventures back home.
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An automated voice alerts the end of each call.
A ROUTINE APPOINTMENT
Manywa drove to the ICE facility in Scarborough with Ivana and Eliana in the back seat for a routine check-in with immigration officials on Aug. 5. It normally takes a couple of minutes — he presents his identification and then is sent on his way. He’s never had any problems before.
But that day, they didn’t ask for his ID. Instead, he said an agent asked why his children were there. He brings them everywhere, like grocery shopping.
The agents told him to call his wife so she could pick up the kids, he said. That’s when he could tell something was wrong.
Seguro was at the hospital with baby Jaya, their 9-month-old daughter.
Alaise Seguro holds her youngest daughter, 9-month-old Jaya, in the living room in their home in Scarborough on Thursday. (Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer)
The agent didn’t give him enough time to explain what was happening, he said, not that he had any answers. They kept asking what was taking her so long. “I think they’re going to arrest me,” he remembered telling his wife over the phone.
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They held Manywa in a separate room from his children. He said he offered to drive back to his house with ICE agents so that his kids wouldn’t have to see him get arrested. But the agents put him in handcuffs as they watched.
Afterward, Seguro and her three children waited outside in the parking lot for 30 minutes. She cried. She had her husband’s keys, but said she doesn’t have a driver’s license or permit. Manywa earned most of their income, working as a certified nursing assistant at the Maine Veterans’ Homes in Scarborough. How would they manage without him?
Protesters who regularly gather at the ICE facility gave Seguro and her children a ride home. Community members visit the family to offer help and donate items. She said a local church is helping them pay rent.
But they can’t give them everything the family needs, Seguro said.
“With the children and the baby, it’s very difficult,” she said.
Eliana dreams about the arrest every night, her mother said. “She was traumatized by the actions she saw in front of her,” Manywa said.
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DETAINED A SECOND TIME
Ivana asked her mother if her father will be gone for a long time — like last time.
Manywa said he recognized Plymouth County Correctional Facility when he was brought there with handcuffs around his hands and feet three weeks ago. He had been there before, just over a year and a half ago.
In 2024, police arrested Manywa for driving under the influence. He didn’t know about the legal blood alcohol limit in the U.S., he said. And he didn’t get into an accident.
At the end of July that year, ICE agents arrested him when he drove to Hannaford to buy milk for the children. They said he was in the country illegally, and they didn’t listen when he tried to explain he had a Social Security number and a work permit, he said.
He spent five days in the Cumberland County Jail, a few months in Rhode Island, and a few more months at Plymouth County Correctional Facility until he was released in February 2025.
Manywa said ICE told him then that as long as he didn’t break any laws, they would leave him alone.
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Since then, Manywa frequently communicated with ICE via email and checked in at the facility in Scarborough every few months. He said he did everything they asked.
He never thought he’d end up in Plymouth again.
MISSING THEIR FATHER
The children don’t fully understand where their father is.
Eliana knows that he’s not there to give her a big hug after he gets home from work or read her a story before bed. She knows he’s in jail, but she’s too young to really grasp what that means, her mother said. She knows it’s a place they put people, and she can’t see him anymore.
Eliana pretends to be a starfish, making snow angels in the dining room while her father tells her mother about the conditions he’s being held in.
He has a sinus infection, made worse by the air conditioning, he says, and he sustains himself on bread and milk, unable to eat anything else.
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Eliana bounces up and peeks through the fluttering translucent curtains to watch the sun.
Eliana, 3, looks out of the window at her home in Scarborough on Thursday. Eliana was with her father, Jonas Manywa, when he was taken at the ICE facility in Scarborough earlier this month while there for a routine appointment. (Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer)
“I wait for the morning,” he says, because he has trouble sleeping.
Eliana picks up a paper airplane and tosses it to her sister.
“My back hurts,” he says. “My ribs hurt.”
Eliana rolls a spikey yellow ball to her sister.
“I am dying, little by little,” he says.
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Ivana, the big sister, knows about ICE. She knows that their presence means staying home from school and hiding. She knows that her father was taken because they are immigrants.
Eliana and Ivana don’t play with other kids anymore.
Ivana, 6, plays with a paper airplane at her home in Scarborough on Thursday. (Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer)
On a sticky Thursday afternoon, they entertain each other in the dining room. They twirl like ballerinas, Ivana gracefully, with all of her weight held delicately on one foot, the other pointing behind her.
Eliana teeters behind her, stumbling, but happy to be like her big sister. They both love the color pink, and practicing their splits on the vinyl flooring.
They ask to kiss and hug their dad all the time.
“I believed in the United States,” Manywa said. “I considered it a country that respects human rights.”
But now, he sits and worries that his children will always remember him in handcuffs.
“It is not the country I thought it was,” he said.
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Tagged: ICE, immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement
Dana Richie is a community reporter covering South Portland and Cape Elizabeth. Originally from Atlanta, she fell in love with the landscape and quirks of coastal New England while completing her undergraduate. More by Dana Richie
Salomé Cloteaux is a community reporter covering Scarborough and Westbrook. She was born in France but lived in Indiana for most of her life before moving to Portland in November 2025. Salomé has a degree. More by Salomé Cloteaux
