Only 11 of the nearly 200 people detained in Maine during a massive January immigration enforcement surge were recorded as having a criminal record, according to federal data released Monday.
The expansive dataset undercuts the federal government’s claim that agents targeted the “worst of the worst” criminals during a five-day sweep of southern Maine. It represents the most official and detailed accounting of who agents arrested during the raid, though it contains some unexplained discrepancies.
ICE only reported 190 arrests during the operation’s five-day window that began Jan. 20, though a spokesperson at the time said agents arrested 206 people. The data was obtained from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement by the Deportation Data Project.
The Bangor Daily News previously identified about a third of detainees using court records and press reports and found that the vast majority lacked a criminal history. Stories of agents arresting parents after they dropped their children off at school and asylum seekers getting arrested at routine check-ins dominated news reports as the raid unfolded.
The federal government appeared to target non-criminals, according to a BDN analysis of the data. Nearly 90 detainees were labeled as “targeted” arrests even though only 11 people arrested in total were listed as having a criminal conviction. Another 25 people had pending criminal cases. The rest, roughly 80% of those arrested, were detained only on immigration violations.
Only 14 people were recorded as having a “threat level” associated with their case, according to the data. A 2011 memo explains that ICE detainees can be categorized into three threat levels based on the severity of a previous criminal conviction.
Four detainees were tagged as the most serious threat level, which relates to an aggravated felony conviction, according to the memo. Two people were classified due to a less serious felony conviction and five people were considered the lowest threat for a misdemeanor conviction.
The data also corroborates anecdotal reports that the raid fell hardest on members of Maine’s Angolan community, many of whom have come here with recent waves of asylum seekers from Eastern and Central Africa. Angolans constituted the greatest number of arrests (40), just ahead of Ecuadorians (36), mirroring a demographic trend that has been true throughout the President Donald Trump’s administration’s ramped-up immigration enforcement activity in Maine.
An ICE spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions or a request for comment on Monday afternoon.
Federal authorities launched the Maine surge, called Operation Catch of the Day, as a much larger operation was already underway in Minneapolis, Minnesota, not long after federal prosecutors there announced a sprawling fraud case that involved members of the area’s Somali population. Nobody from Maine’s Somali community, which is largely made up of refugees and U.S. citizens, showed up in the data released Monday.
The Minnesota operation became increasingly controversial with the American public after ICE agents shot two American citizens and the fallout included the ouster of then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
In Maine, residents in liberal-leaning southern cities where the sweep took place resisted the federal presence by filming and honking their car horns at agents as they conducted arrests, resulting in some tense moments but not violence. Cumberland County Sheriff Kevin Joyce criticized ICE’s aggressive arrest of one of his recruits as “bush league,” prompting the agency to stop housing its detainees in the Portland jail.
At least a quarter of people arrested during Operation Catch of the Day went on to challenge their detention in federal court. They were often following a legal path to immigration when they were arrested, according to their court petitions. Many have since been released.
Arrests during the operation made up well over half of ICE detentions in Maine so far this year, the data show. The agency has arrested 245 people in 2026 as of March 9, the data show. That figure does not include additional arrests by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
BDN writers Sawyer Loftus and Michael Shepherd contributed reporting.
