On Nov. 18, 2025, Manuel Ndongala drove to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Scarborough for what he expected to be a routine check-in with immigration officials.
He had fled his native Angola in 2023 to escape political persecution, flying to Brazil and then traveling up through South and Central America to claim asylum at the southern U.S. border. He eventually made his way to Maine, where he found an attic apartment in Springvale and began working at a telecom company in New Hampshire, a 45-minute drive away.
He had gotten used to traveling to the Scarborough office for regular meetings about his pending asylum case. But his November appointment was different: He was told he was eligible for removal and was being detained. He got little explanation for why.
“They said I missed appointments, but I told them that was impossible,” he said. “Then they told me they didn’t have to give me a reason, and they were just doing their job.”
Ndongala was taken to a detention center in Plymouth, Massachusetts. His car, a 2003 Toyota Camry, was left in the ICE office parking lot. Officials offered him a chance to call someone to move the car, he said, but his lawyer did not pick up, and he was afraid to call his friends in the African community out of fear that they, too, could be detained.
When he was released more than 80 days later, his car was gone. People advocating on his behalf soon discovered the truth: His car had been towed by a Cumberland County towing company, which now possessed it under the state’s abandoned vehicle law.
His story made its way to a local lawmaker, Rep. Anne-Marie Mastraccio, D-Sanford, and then to the Maine Department of the Secretary of State. In early February, following a surge in immigration enforcement in southern Maine, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows decided to temporarily adjust the state’s process for transferring ownership of abandoned vehicles to ensure immigrants understood their rights and give them a chance to object to a title transfer, she said.
In Maine, if a person’s car is towed, and no one pays the fees to have it released within two weeks, a towing company can go to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and request a title transfer to get ownership of the car and the ability to then sell it or junk it. When the state receives such a transfer request, it sends the owner of the vehicle a letter in the mail that gives them 21 days to contest the seizure. Once that period is up, if there has been no response, the title is automatically transferred, and the towing company owns the car.
Bellows realized immigrants who were detained might miss that notification window, as Ndongala did. On Feb. 10, she paused the automatic title transfer process. And on March 6, her office sent a letter to immigrant rights advocates, explaining the steps their clients could take if their cars had been seized by a towing company.
The letter said a detained immigrant’s family or their lawyer could petition the secretary of state’s office for a hearing to delay or deny a title transfer pending a hearing before an immigration judge, and recommended that they notify the Bureau of Motor Vehicles no more than 21 days after an immigrant’s detention, as there are time limits under which vehicle ownership can be protected under state law.
It went on to say that the office had heard of residents being released without their driver’s license or identification card, and said if that were the case the Bureau of Motor Vehicles could replace an ID free of charge.
Bellows, who is running for governor, told The Maine Monitor she believed this unprecedented step was necessary at a time when ICE was using traffic stops as a way to arrest people. She was concerned many people would lose their cars as they were detained, sometimes out of state and with little understanding of how long they might be held.
Immigrant advocates echoed this concern.
“In a rural state like Maine, where driving is a basic need, losing a vehicle could have a devastating impact on an individual and family, especially compounded with the other traumatic impacts of ICE detention,” said Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project Policy Director Lisa Parisio.
Abandoned vehicles
During the federal immigration enforcement operation that swept Maine in January, a number of immigrants were pulled over and detained while driving to and from work or while dropping children off at school. In some cases the cars were left running on the side of the road. If those cars were not moved by bystanders, they risked getting towed.
Cars have also been towed following traffic stops, which have been part of immigration enforcement efforts for a long time. A log of records requested by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine shows federal authorities with ICE and Border Patrol have detained at least 137 people across the state since October 2023 after being contacted by local law enforcement during a traffic stop. Most of those detentions happened last year.
Of those, 29 mention a vehicle getting towed, according to a Maine Monitor review. Some of those police incident reports and logs detail the officer’s inventory of the vehicle, what towing company was called and how long they waited until the vehicle was impounded. Other logs only mention a tow was requested.
ICE said in a statement to The Monitor that the agency allows detainees to arrange for someone to pick up an abandoned vehicle and gives them 48 hours to do so. Staff will retain the keys of cars left at an office. If the car is not moved, towing is arranged by the Federal Protective Service, a law enforcement agency that protects federal facilities.
“Like any other law enforcement agency, ICE will ensure that a vehicle left after an illegal alien’s arrest is secured and does not impede traffic flow,” the statement said.
Lisa Markushewski, a program assistant for asylee assistance group Hope Acts in Portland, said her group currently has 85 clients, the majority of whom she said were detained while driving their cars.
Of those, 15 clients were detained at the Scarborough ICE office in recent months, with four instances occurring during the January surge. She also knew of 13 cases where clients were pulled out of their cars while driving by ICE, with the car left by the side of the road, sometimes with the motor still running. Half of those occurred during the surge.
In all of those cases, Markushewski said Hope Acts was able to find a U.S. citizen to move a car from a lot or was aware that a bystander observing the arrest had moved the vehicle.
Still, there are other challenges involved with securing a client’s car, such as finding a place to park vehicles long-term while not knowing how long their owners might be detained, she said. And ICE is not always helpful in moving a car, particularly when left at its Scarborough office, she said.
“They either don’t know where the keys are, refuse to tell us if they have the keys, or [don’t] provide the keys even if they know they have them,” Markushewski said. “They also refuse to give us a deadline to retrieve the car and will not provide the name of the towing company they use.”
For those whose cars were towed, the process of retrieving them can be financially fraught, said Ruben Torres, an advocacy and policy manager with the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition. People might need to pay for a rideshare to get to a tow yard. Wrecking companies might be cash-only, or quote them fees they are unable to pay — and there is no state standard for what fees can be charged. Language barriers might make it difficult to find information about their car’s location, he said.
The secretary of state’s office is unable to tell how many people may have lost their cars while detained by ICE during the recent surge. Towing companies are not required to state how they came into possession of a vehicle when they apply for a title transfer, Bellows said, and she lacks the legal authority to delve into the specific circumstances of each case. Her office noted no specific instances of a non-English speaker contesting a title transfer while automatic transfers were paused.
She attributed that to interventions by friends and neighbors. “It was really clear during the ICE surge that networks of mutual aid, friends and community members stepped up to provide wraparound support to impacted communities,” Bellows said.
Limited regulations
Recent concerns about how towing practices have affected detainees fit into broader questions the secretary of state’s office has raised about the state’s towing industry.
There are no laws requiring towing companies to adhere to a set storage or towing fee, although they are supposed to be “reasonable,” and towns often have rate guidelines that they expect towing companies to follow. They follow different structures: Portland charges a flat $135 towing fee unless special equipment is used and a $40-per day impoundment rate. A tow in Freeport can range from $100 to $150, depending on the time and the weather, and has a $50 daily storage fee. Fees in Windham can range from $95 for a daytime tow to $130 for a nighttime crash tow.
There are no state licensing requirements. The industry has faced little recent regulation aside from a law passed in 2017 that required towing companies to report possession of a vehicle to the secretary of state’s office and capped storage fees at $900 for a 30-day period.
The Maine attorney general’s office has received 100 unique complaints about the towing industry since 2019, according to a report by a recent working group. It cited issues such as vehicle owners being unable to find their vehicles after they were towed, arbitrary or predatory fees, and a lack of transparency in how towing practices were conducted.
The working group suggested several potential fixes: licensing towing companies under the secretary of state’s office; creating a committee to study and then determine standardized towing fees; allowing the state to set a maximum fee; and establishing documentation rules, among other things.
The study also suggested a change that could have affected Ndongala’s case: anyone who failed to claim a vehicle because of circumstances beyond their control, such as hospitalization, incarceration or military deployment, would be exempt from the state’s abandoned vehicle law if they could provide evidence of their situation to the secretary of state’s office.
The Maine Legislature’s transportation committee is expected to take up these recommendations next year.
“I think towing operators would benefit from having a set of rules and regulations that would support fair business practices, promote competition and level the playing field,” Bellows said. “It would also strengthen the trust between the towing industry and the public.”
Scott Hatch, who has been in the towing business for over 30 years and is the vice president of the Towing & Recovery Association of Maine, participated in the working group. He said towing companies are in difficult situations when cars do not get claimed because they take up valuable space. Cars sometimes get abandoned because they are too old or damaged to recover.
“We’re not just taking anybody’s car,” he said. “It’s impossible to just tow the car and own the car.”
But Hatch understands the need for standard practices, and he advised the working group to adopt many aspects of New Hampshire’s towing laws, which require towing companies to submit annual rate sheets to the state for state police-related tows and allow consumers to contest a nonconsensual tow after paying a bill. He also supports the idea of a statewide electronic database, which would allow people to look up where their towed vehicles ended up.
Still, he said in his experience people who want to get their cars back usually do. He said those who are unable to retrieve their cars themselves should give power of attorney to someone who can.
‘We own the car’
When Ndongala was released in February, he turned to Jennifer Davie, a housing coordinator for the York County Community Action Corporation, to see if she could find out what had happened to his car.
Davie called the Scarborough Police Department, which directed her to ICE, who in turn said the car was towed by Windham-based Yaz Towing.
The conversation with the towing company was abrupt, she said.
“‘We own the car. He no longer owns the car,’” Davie recalled being told. “It was really as matter of fact as that.”
Davie said the towing employee she spoke to said Ngongala could try to buy his car back but did not quote a price. His belongings that had been in the car were disposed of “according to the law,” she was told — thrown away, she assumed.
Rob Boynton, the deputy day manager for Yaz Towing, told The Monitor he remembered towing Ndongala’s car and that it was eventually junked due to its age.
The company does not have a contract with ICE to tow vehicles from their Scarborough lot, Boynton said, but he remembered an increase in requests for services there during a two-week period in January.
“It was kind of a weird situation,” Boynton said. “But now with an understanding of what was going on, I feel bad. I don’t want to cause more heartache because of it.”
Meanwhile, Ndongala’s community rallied to get him back on the road.
A Sanford interfaith group raised about $4,000 through a GoFundMe to get him a new vehicle.
“He was a contributing member of society,” said Pam Kutzer, a member of the group. “He was paying taxes and doing everything he should be doing.”
Now, Ndongala owns another Toyota Camry. It is nondescript — gray, with beige floor mats swept clean.
Ndongala likes driving, and likes where he lives, so different from Angola, he said. But a Massachusetts immigration judge ordered his removal from the country on Feb. 13; that decision has been appealed and is currently pending. Still, he is not sure he will drive Maine’s roads much longer.
This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news organization. To get regular coverage from The Monitor, sign up for a free Monitor newsletter here.
