Earlier this week, we brought you the news that the Department of Homeland Security had started a immigration crackdown in Maine, dubbed ‘Operation Catch of the Day’. Speaking to Fox News, Patricia Hyde, deputy assistant director of ICE, said the agency has compiled a list of 1,400 individuals in Maine it intends to target.

In a statement to the Guardian on Friday, DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said ICE agents had already arrested “more than 100 illegal aliens” since the operation began. The department said some of those taken into custody are “the worst of the worst” and have been “charged and convicted of horrific crimes,” but cited the same four examples it released earlier in the week.

Immigrant rights groups have been on alert as ICE concentrates its operation on Maine’s two largest cities, Portland and Lewiston. Organizers say agents have been targeting African nationals from Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Angola, many of them asylees who have made the coastal state home in recent decades.

On Wednesday, a local ICE sighting hotline – organized and run by Maine Immigrant Rights Coalition – said they received more than 1,100 calls, a 35% increase in calls from the previous day. Immigrants in Maine only represent about 4% of the state’s total population, most of whom have legal status to live and work in the US, according to a recent report by the Migration Policy Institute.

At a press conference in Portland on Thursday, Janet Mills, the state’s Democratic governor, said the Trump administration has not returned her calls since the operation began. She added that her office has received reports of people with no criminal record being detained and urged homeland security to be transparent in its actions, saying she would be “shocked” if federal law enforcement located 1,400 individuals with criminal backgrounds.

“If they have warrants, show the warrants,” she said. “We don’t believe in secret arrests or secret police.”

Mills also described widespread fear in schools, workplaces, and businesses that are losing employees who have either been detained or are not showing up, despite living in the state legally.

Earlier this week, a video by 28-year-old Crisitan Vaca – an Ecuadoran immigrant living in Maine with valid immigration status – went viral online. In the footage, federal agents appear outside Vaca’s home in Biddeford, 18 miles south of Portland, where he lives with his wife and young son. In an interview with the Associated Press in Spanish through a translator, Vaca said that he approached the officers when they were taking pictures outside his house.

When Vaca refused to go outside, the video shows one of the agents telling him that they will “come back for your whole family” through Vaca’s screen door.

“I have been in this country since September 2023,” Vaca, who works as a roofer, told the AP. “I have immigration status … the judge postponed my court date to another day. Now I have a new court date. I have my work permit. I have my social security number [sic].”

Local authorities also decried the scope of the federal immigration dragnet this week. Cumberland County sheriff Kevin Joyce said that on Wednesday evening one of his corrections officer recruits was arrested by ICE agents. “This is an individual that had permission to be working in the state of Maine. We vetted him,” the sheriff said of the unnamed recruit. Joyce was one of more than 100 national sheriffs who met with Trump’s border czar Tom Homan last year. “The book in the movie do not line up,” Joyce told reporters on Thursday. “We’re being told one story, which is totally different than what’s occurring.”

According to the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project (ILAP), Maine’s only statewide immigration legal services organization, they have received several fearful calls as the crackdown continues. This includes a pregnant woman who reached out to ILAP because she was “terrified to leave her home to go to a medical appointment”. Another person called and said someone had “pulled the fire alarm in her building, desperately trying to save people from ICE”. ILAP said that they received reports of teachers escorting immigrant children home from school who had agents follow them and push their way into an apartment building lobby.

“It is clear the overall operation is anything but targeted,” said Sue Roche, ILAP’s executive director. “People are being racially profiled on the streets and in their cars. As is their playbook, ICE is doing everything they can to inflict maximum cruelty and chaos.”

ILAP also noted that they’re seeing arrested people transferred out of the state to detention facilities in New England. DHS did not respond to Guardian’s request for comment about where detainees are being held since Maine does not have a dedicated immigration detention facility.

In Lewiston, it’s “hard to overstate the level of fear within the community” according to Democratic congressional candidate Jordan Wood, who is running to replace outgoing US representative Jared Golden. “I have heard that as many as 20% of students at certain schools did not show up,” Wood, who was born, raised and lives in the area, told the Guardian.

He added that the community response to the ICE surge – from ensuring immigrants know their rights to sharing where agents have been spotted – has been hugely encouraging. “It’s important to just know the community that that they’re coming after won’t stand idly by while our neighbors are terrorized,” Wood said.

At her press conference in Portland, Mills still wanted more information about the decision to target the Pine Tree State. “Why Maine? Why now? What were the orders that came from above? Who’s giving the orders?,” she said, adding that state officials have reached out to the Trump administration but still “have no answers”.