ICE Out laws and class action follow Durán Guerrero killing
Much of the time, the scene outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in the small, coastal town of Scarborough, Maine, could be confused for a nature watch in “Vacationland,” the slogan on state license plates: people in lawn chairs under a tent, birds chirping, the breeze moving through the trees. When four Escalades zoom into the facility’s parking lot on an August afternoon, the group springs out of their chairs, binoculars and clipboards in hand — some rapidly calling out license plate numbers, makes and models while another scribbles the information down. This is what monitoring ICE operations looks like in the east coast’s most sparsely populated state: documenting the agency’s unmarked vehicles and keeping a record of detainments — the people arriving for routine appointments or brought in by agents and never seen leaving.
ICE-watching — following, documenting and alerting neighbors to federal immigration agents’ public activities — is a longtime, constitutionally protected practice that became more popular in response to the Trump administration’s ramping up of on-the-ground immigration-enforcement operations last year, the Guardian reported. It drew particular attention in Minneapolis in January, when neighbors came out in droves to record and interfere as agents pulled people out of cars, off sidewalks and from bus stops. Though ICE has shifted to less visible tactics since the start of the year, the number of immigration arrests is higher than ever, including in rural and suburban areas such as much of Maine, the Guardian reported, and ICE observers are still there, too — albeit exhausted and burned out.
At the Scarborough facility, observers told the Guardian they have been seeing, on average, two detentions a day: people brought to the facility in shackles by ICE agents, and people who arrive for routine appointments and never come back out, sometimes abandoning their cars. The Guardian said the estimate is borne out in Department of Homeland Security data it monitored. In their informal capacity, the volunteers have at times become the first line of support to dazed family members exiting the facility.
The network doing this work in Maine is small. In many of the US’s largest cities, immigrant-rights networks count hundreds if not thousands of volunteers and dozens of neighborhood-based encrypted chats and organizations that activate on short notice. The Maine Immigrant Rights Coalition (MIRC), a small nonprofit representing more than 100 state-based organizations, estimates it has about 100 trained, regular volunteers on its roster. Some days, the Guardian reported, ICE-watching in the state is just three people in lawn chairs scrawling license plate numbers in their notebooks.
Crystal Cron, co-founder and executive director of Presente! Maine — a Latino-led organization that has given out about $200,000 in bond money for immigrants in detention every month since Trump retook office — described the work as never-ending. “People are trying the best they can — learning and utilizing new skills, and responding to crises in community — and then there’s another one, and there’s another one, and there’s another one,” she told the Guardian. “That is what the escalating violence is meant to do — it’s meant to exhaust us and confuse us.” “The death of Johan has been devastating, but for us it was not a surprise,” she added. “Our communities have always been under threat of persecution. Being hunted in the streets is not new.”
ICE-watching efforts in Maine ramped up in January, when the Trump administration launched Operation Catch of the Day, which the Guardian described as an intense crackdown on undocumented residents, named in reference to the state’s $600m fishing industry powered in part by migrant labor. In a state with a population a third of the size of the city of Los Angeles and where immigrants make up roughly 4% of residents, 100 people were arrested in three days, the majority of whom had no criminal records and were lawfully in the US, the Guardian reported. Masked agents smashed car windows and removed drivers from their vehicles, then abandoned the cars — at least once with a mother and baby inside — on the side of the road; children watched agents detain their parents from their front steps. The operation “shocked the whole system,” said Mufalo Chitam, executive director of the MIRC. “The tactic was much faster than the traditional system that we had envisioned. By the time somebody can call [in a sighting], somebody’s already been picked up.”
Residents and local community groups came together, following ICE vehicles and dropping off groceries for immigrant neighbors too scared to leave their homes. The operation lasted nine days, and soon after, public backlash over ICE violence across the US reached new heights. The killing of two ICE observers in Minneapolis sparked widespread protests and intensified scrutiny of the administration. Trump replaced the Department of Homeland Security’s leadership, directing ICE to adopt “a little bit of a softer touch.” But while agents have become less visible in public, the Guardian reported, in Maine they never went away.
In July, an ICE agent fatally shot 25-year-old father Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero during a traffic stop in Biddeford, 15 minutes from Scarborough — a killing that came just days after an agent killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Texas, also during a traffic stop, and that shattered any illusion of ICE’s “softer touch,” the Guardian reported. Protesters demonstrated outside Senator Susan Collins’ office after the July 13, 2026 killing. The week Durán was killed, the organizers’ ICE-watching hotline received 128 calls, according to MIRC’s Chitam. People in Biddeford once again took to the streets, and elected officials demanded an investigation. This time, though, already-traumatized and outraged residents felt pushed to the brink, organizers said — many of the state’s immigrants have been effectively sheltering in place for the last nine months.
Organizers had been preparing for this moment. Last October, the MIRC and other community groups such as the People’s Coalition for Safety and Justice launched their hotline to report ICE sightings. The MIRC also built a network of volunteers who could speak the many languages reflected in Maine’s immigrant population — Somali, Haitian Creole, Arabic — coordinated via the encrypted app Signal. Since then, the MIRC’s handful of staffers have been triaging between state offices, other policy organizations and community members, from assisting business owners protecting immigrant employees to lobbying elected officials on what resources they need. In May, the MIRC and Presente! created Lighthouse ME, an online “immigrant defense hub” that includes ICE arrest data and a visual tracker of sightings, the Guardian reported.
To hold ICE accountable, the Maine chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union recently launched a hotline to report First Amendment violations. The Guardian reported that during the January operation, ICE agents followed observers home to intimidate them, fired pepper balls at their cars and told residents they would be added to a “domestic terrorist” list. Those residents and other observers have since filed a federal class action lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security. “The constitution guarantees your right to observe and record law enforcement agents when they’re doing their job in public. And yet the government keeps finding new ways to try to interfere with people’s first amendment rights,” said Zach Heiden, chief counsel at the ACLU of Maine. “But if bringing a lawsuit is necessary, then that’s what we’re going to do, for as long as it takes.”
Despite the state’s smaller network, residents have already seen its impact at the state level: thirteen days after Durán’s killing, three “ICE Out” laws went into effect, blocking cooperation between ICE and local police forces, landlords, schools and state healthcare facilities, the Guardian reported. Heiden observed that none of those laws would have saved Durán’s life, and many organizers said much more needs to change to prevent another ICE killing. This weekend, residents plan to march 70 miles (113km) from Collins’ office in Biddeford to the state capital in protest of her support for ICE funding.
Cron testified during an August hearing that “Johan’s death is not an isolated tragedy. It is part of a system that has inflicted fear, separation, detention and death on immigrant communities. The responsibility for his death, and the many deaths by immigration police and in ICE detention this year, is a collective one.” At a congressional “shadow hearing” in August — an unofficial proceeding hosted by US Representative Chellie Pingree investigating Durán’s killing — the Biddeford high school auditorium was packed with irate residents holding signs declaring “ICE = Terrorists, Democrat Silence = Complicity.” When Durán’s parents walked in, a heavy hush fell over the room. Durán’s father, his voice thick with held-back tears, testified through an interpreter: “Our dream was always to be reunited and to hold each other again. Today that dream can no longer come true.”
On the same day, just 10 minutes away, another group of Mainers grieved and organized at Biddeford’s Mechanics Park — the site where French and Irish immigrants blocked the Ku Klux Klan from a planned march into Biddeford more than 100 years ago. The park is now occupied by activists and an art installation: hundreds of ribbons tied to a fence with messages for Durán and the city’s immigrant residents, alongside stocks of snacks, Narcan, “know your rights” zines and 3D-printed whistles. When a neighborhood kid drops by a tent and takes a free Gatorade from the cooler, he tells the person making “Fuck ICE” bracelets he’ll come back later. “We’ll be here,” she replies.
While organizers in Maine and many other parts of the country have been stretched thin, ICE-watching remains robust in bigger cities, though the tactics are evolving. In Chicago, a year after Operation Midway Blitz, observers are still looking for agents and carrying whistles to alert their neighbors, though community support is now more focused on managing trauma through cultural events and vigils, the Guardian reported. New York never saw the sweeping on-the-ground operations that Chicago, Maine or Minnesota did, but the city’s large population is a boon for its ICE-watching network: a patchwork of nonprofit organizations, longtime community organizing groups and mutual aid networks all support immigrant communities. Organizers with Hands Off NYC, which launched a year ago, said at least hundreds of people have taken know-your-rights training offered online in the last several months.
At the Scarborough facility, fresh in observers’ minds is the case of Jonas Manywa, a 42-year-old asylum seeker from the Democratic Republic of Congo who arrived for a routine appointment in early August. Agents arrested him in front of his two young daughters. When his wife came with their nine-month-old to pick up their children, she had his car keys but couldn’t drive — the crew of volunteers helped her figure out how to get home. Most days, people stop by the tent at the Scarborough facility, dropping off water bottles and snacks for the volunteers and thanking them for their efforts, but even with that community support, it has been difficult to recruit new volunteers. “Now more than ever, we need people to join us to build a better, more free world,” said Cron. “Anytime they’re here,” one ICE observer said, looking at the Scarborough facility, “we’re here.”