This story appears as part of a collaboration to strengthen investigative journalism in Maine between the BDN and The Maine Monitor. Read more about the partnership.
Around 10 a.m. on Jan. 22, Westbrook pastor Carlos Nzolameso received a call from a member of his congregation who was searching for a roommate. Evaristo Kalonji, who organizes and plays the music at the church, had not shown up to his job at Chipotle.
Several other congregants also reached out to Nzolameso, concerned that Kalonji, an asylum-seeker from Angola, was missing. Nzolameso, who leads the predominantly Portuguese-speaking Rehoboth Christian Church, said Kalonji, who has no family in the United States, is like a son.
He set out to find him.
Nzolameso spent a couple hours searching for Kalonji in and around South Portland, where Kalonji lives. Nzolameso checked with the police department for any traffic stops or accidents. His efforts yielded no answers. He weighed checking the hospital next.
It wasn’t until the pastor made a final trip to retrace Kalonji’s commute that he spotted his car — a black Ford Fusion — two minutes away from Kalonji’s home. It was parked on Westbrook Street in South Portland. The car was unlocked, he said, and the keys were on the floor.
“I was devastated. I couldn’t even believe it,” said Noemia Nzolameso, the pastor’s daughter, when she heard the news. “I was in shock. Literally.”
Though Kalonji has no criminal record, the pastor suspected he could have been detained by federal agents as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security began a widespread immigration enforcement operation in Maine last week.
But Nzolameso had no way of confirming what had happened until later that day, when he received a brief call from Kalonji, who said he had been detained by immigration agents. He was calling from a detention center in Burlington, Massachusetts, and seemed confused as to why he was there, Nzolameso said.
Kalonji has a pending asylum case, according to the Executive Office for Immigration Review, part of the U.S. Department of Justice. Kalonji originally had a court date scheduled for this year, but it was recently postponed to May 2028, Nzolameso said.
Nzolamesco later learned that Kalonji was then moved to a detention center in Central Falls, Rhode Island, according to an online federal database.
On Saturday, a lawyer for Kalonji filed an emergency petition in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts for a writ of habeas corpus, challenging the detention, according to online court records. The detainee locator system showed Kalonji was still in Rhode Island as of Jan. 28.
A background search in TLOxp, a database from TransUnion, returned no criminal records for Kalonji.
The Maine Monitor asked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Monday why it had detained Kalonji. The agency had not provided an answer as of Wednesday morning.
Officials from homeland security told Fox News last week, when the operation started, that it was targeting approximately 1,400 people in Maine. So far, the agency claims to have detained more than 200 people in Maine. It has only released limited names but said in a press release that it is going after “the worst of the worst.”
The Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, however, said that most people who have been detained and sought its help are going through lawful immigration processes and have no criminal background.
A recent report from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, found that nearly 3 in 4 people detained by ICE in October and early November last year had never been convicted of a crime.
Last week, Maine Monitor reporting found that a mother of four with no criminal history was detained after dropping off a child at school, and a civil engineer with no criminal history was detained by masked agents who smashed his window and left his car running in the street.
Nzolameso, who has been leading the church for five years, has found himself navigating a challenging immigration detention system on behalf of some of his congregants. Kalonji is the fourth congregant of his church to have been detained by immigration officials in the past six months, Nzolameso said. Three other men were detained between August and December, he said, and only one has been released.
“I’m the pastor. I need to take care [of] them,” he said. “I preach the word of God for them. But I need to care for them, too, because they have no family.”
While sitting at a desk in the basement of his Westbrook home, Nzolameso’s phone rang repeatedly as church members tried to reach him. On the night before Kalonji was detained, Nzolameso had told his congregants to reach out if they had any concerns as the immigration operation took on a new force in Maine.
Many church members have stopped showing up to services, he said, which has led him to start preaching online. Others are not going to work.
“Everybody is afraid,” Nzolameso said. “They don’t know what’s going to happen.”
