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The young woman sat expressionless against a wall as her attorney and a government lawyer argued over a computer screen about whether she should stay locked up.
The woman, an Angolan immigrant, had overstayed her visa years ago and now posed a flight risk if an immigration judge allowed her to post bond, the lawyer for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said. But the judge was ultimately more persuaded by the woman’s attorney, who painted a fuller picture of her client’s life in Maine.
The federal government described its massive immigration enforcement surge in Maine last month as a mission to arrest dangerous immigrants. Within days, dozens of those immigrants went to court and told an entirely different story. Some have won a chance at freedom or already been released.
At least 47 immigrants who were arrested during the surge called “Operation Catch of the Day” went on to challenge their detention, demanding their immediate release or a bond hearing before an immigration court, according to a review of documents that the Bangor Daily News obtained from courts across New England.
One after the other, attorneys for immigrants arrested in Maine questioned the justifications for why their clients were picked up, describing the vast majority as law-abiding people in the midst of a legal immigration process when they were arrested.
They held jobs as cooks, health care professionals and construction workers. Some had been living in the country for years, only to be detained without a clear reason. Several have physical and developmental disabilities that have caused additional hardship in detention.
The legal filings reviewed by the BDN account for nearly a fourth of the 206 immigrants that federal officials said they detained during the five-day Maine operation in late January. The records provide the most detailed windows yet into the harsh conditions that immigrants swept up in the surge have encountered in detention and the legal battles they have waged to get out.
The Angolan woman was one of at least three Maine detainees who were granted bond at a hearing in immigration court in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, on Thursday morning after challenging their detentions. Before her visa expired, she had applied for asylum and had built a life in southern Maine in the years since her case has been pending, her petition says.
On the fourth day of the Maine surge, masked agents pulled her over on the Maine Turnpike and failed to identify themselves or provide an explanation for why they were arresting her, she argued. The agents had no arrest warrant. Nor did they ask any questions to assess whether she would be a flight risk if they didn’t immediately arrest her, wrote one of her lawyers.
“Had they done so, they would have learned that she had been living in Maine for over seven years, worked two jobs to help support her family, was engaged to be married to a man living in Maine, and taught Sunday School,” the lawyer wrote.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions about the arrests during the Maine surge, which it announced by saying it was targeted at “targeting the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens across Maine.”
The court cases are part of a flood of so-called habeas corpus petitions that have overwhelmed federal courts across the country in recent weeks as the federal government moves to deny bond hearings to immigrants in detention. The Maine petitioners are primarily demanding their right to due process, but some have also argued their arrests were unlawful and they should be freed immediately. Many of their lawyers have also sought to prevent their transfer to jurisdictions outside of New England, where it’s harder for immigrants to fight their cases.
Most of the petitions reviewed by the BDN were filed in Massachusetts, the state where the majority of Maine detainees were initially brought. Many immediately confronted a regional shortage of detention beds that forced them to endure cramped, inadequate conditions.
At least two dozen people were housed at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Burlington, Massachusetts, when they filed their legal petition. It’s a building that is not designed to hold people longer than 12 hours, according to court records and lawyers.
One who has been held there was an Angolan asylum seeker who is in his 30s but uses a walker due to a medical issue with his right leg stemming from recent back surgery. The ICE office had no showers, and men and women had to share a room with a toilet that provided no privacy, according to his petition. Those conditions have drawn heavy scrutiny, including from U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Massachusetts.
The Angolan man has spent at least 10 days there. At one point, an ICE official called his attorney to ask for medical records because agents did not know how to properly care for him, lawyer Robin Nice said in an interview. ICE officers have blamed the conditions at Burlington on the flood of federal petitions that have often prevented the agency from moving immigrants out of the region, she said.
“It incenses me,” said Nice, who also represented a teenager whose controversial detention last summer drew national headlines to Burlington’s conditions. “It’s backward and punitive.”
The Angolan man was arrested on the second day of the Maine surge after finishing a shift at the Westbrook Home Depot, according to his petition. He is one of the 46 petitioners who claimed in court filings they lacked a criminal record, and one of the 45 who said they had a pending immigration court case to obtain permanent lawful residency in the U.S. when they were arrested. At least 10 said they had obtained permission to work in the country.
Only two of the petitions reviewed by the BDN were by someone the Department of Homeland Security highlighted in a press release about the operation as one of the criminals it had come to Maine to round up.
A Guatemalan man has a drunk driving conviction from years ago, his attorney, Jacob Binnall, told the BDN. In a court filing, his attorney said that he has lived in the country for more than two decades and filed an application for legal residence in 2015. He has not had a bond hearing. The other is a woman from Angola who entered the U.S. on a visa. She was charged in 2025 with endangering the welfare of a child, but has not been convicted.
Some petitioners described their arrests as random and indiscriminate, or they were arrested at routine check-ins. Three said they had previously completed a federal detention diversion program after they crossed the border.
“ICE informed him that his detention resulted simply from a general enforcement operation and not from any specific allegation or individualized basis,” wrote the attorney for a Nicaraguan woman who was arrested on the first day of the surge while walking to work in South Portland.
In some cases, the petitioners included details about how their arrest had upended their lives. One man worked to support his epileptic wife; another had four children, three of them citizens, one of them born 10 days before his arrest. An Ecuadorian man who said that agents chased him in the parking lot of a Westbrook grocery store had a cognitive issue that has made his confinement “especially difficult and confusing,” court records show.
It is not entirely clear how each petitioner’s case will unfold as they are still playing out.
One lawyer, Shaan Chatterjee, said that ICE freed one of his clients before a bond hearing. The lawyer did not know the exact reason why but speculated that the government did not want to deal with providing an interpreter for his client, a Nicaraguan asylum seeker who is deaf.
Meanwhile, federal judges have been siding with immigrants by saying the government owes them a bond hearing, The New York Times reported. The torrent in recent cases has been so overwhelming that a federal prosecutor in Minnesota, where a massive immigration operation has been ongoing for weeks, lost her job after breaking down in court from stress.
During Thursday morning’s hearing in Chelmsford immigration court, where several petitioners were now getting bond hearings, Brinhley Alviarez, a lawyer for the Department of Homeland Security, at one point complained about her caseload, saying she has “too many cases.”
Like the Sunday school teacher, Nice also won a bond for her Angolan client. He also appeared over Zoom, hunched over his walker beneath a fluorescent light. But her six clients arrested in Maine have faced wildly different outcomes, she said, showing how others arrested during Operation Catch of the Day could face more uphill battles to freedom.
New England is the only federal jurisdiction in which the burden is on the government, not the immigrant, to prove that a detainee is a flight risk or danger to the public and ought to be denied bond. But not all of the Maine detainees have remained in the region. Nice described two similar clients whose movement seemed to influence their journeys through detention.
One was freed after only 70 hours in detention because Nice immediately filed a habeas petition. For the other, Nice was too late. The woman, a mother of four with no criminal record, had already been moved to Louisiana. The woman was supposed to have a bond hearing there last week, Nice said. Before that could happen, the government moved her again.
As of Friday, she was at a privately run ICE detention center in Arizona.
Callie Ferguson is the deputy investigations editor for Maine Focus, the BDN’s investigations team. She can be reached at [email protected].
Bangor Daily News investigative reporter Sawyer Loftus can be reached at [email protected].
