The sun had just begun to rise over the Maine Turnpike when Trooper James Anstett noticed a black Chrysler minivan with Massachusetts plates going too fast and staying too long in the left lane.
He decided to pull the van over. Behind the wheel, he discovered a dark-haired man who didn’t speak English and a teenage boy in the passenger seat. Anstett asked for the driver’s valid Maine license, according to a report he later wrote about the stop. The man didn’t have one.
What happened next has been well-publicized in media outlets across New England. The trooper contacted U.S. Customs and Border Protection. When a federal agent arrived, he detained the adult, who had a criminal history and an arrest warrant that slated him for deportation, according to a social media post from the agency.
Federal officials also took custody of the driver’s 17-year-old passenger and nephew, Jose Adalberto Herrera, who has no criminal history and recently reunited with his mother and siblings in Lewiston after arriving in the United States years earlier as an unaccompanied minor.
The teenager’s Feb. 27 arrest in Falmouth made headlines in March for illustrating President Donald Trump’s willingness to separate undocumented minors from their families. But the details of how the teenager and his uncle went from driving to work to federal custody highlights a different issue that has gotten more scrutiny since Trump returned to power: the role that local police play in aiding federal immigration enforcement.
The case is an example of the informal nature of what that coordination often looks like in Maine, where lawmakers and the public are debating to what degree local law enforcement should coordinate with federal authorities enforcing Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
The episode, described in a police report obtained by the Bangor Daily News, shows how an officer’s discretion can steer a minor traffic stop into a different kind of roadside investigation. Those decisions can carry higher-stakes consequences for immigrants like Herrera under the second Trump administration.
In the months since his arrest, Herrera has been detained in New York City at a facility for immigrant children and faces possible deportation, according to the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, a Maine-based group that is one of several legal advocacy organizations working on the boy’s case.
Advocates have called his treatment harsh and unusual because the teenager had already worked with the federal government to reunite with his parents after he first entered the country as an unaccompanied minor in 2019, when he was 12.
“Jose is a 17-year-old kid following a lawful immigration process. He has no criminal record. He wasn’t even driving the car,” Melissa Brennan, co-legal director of the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, said. “None of this, from Maine State Police holding him and handing him over to immigration officials to his ongoing detention, serves any legitimate public policy purpose. It is needless, abject cruelty.”
The Maine State Police has no formal policy about when troopers should reach out to immigration authorities in the course of their usual duties, leaving those decisions to the discretion of the officer.
In this instance, Anstett wrote in his police report that he called U.S. Customs and Border Protection because he could find no trace of the driver in the law enforcement database installed in his cruiser using a name that the driver provided. He wanted a federal agent to help confirm the man’s identity, he wrote.
But the absence of a policy that outlines when officers should contact immigration authorities means that officers will operate based on their opinions, resulting in uneven treatment, and introduces the potential for racial profiling, Frank Mancini, a retired Boston police superintendent who served as a district commander in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood and now consults on police practices, said.
“These days, it’s a high-profile national issue, so there most certainly should be written clear policies and procedures with respect to these types of situations,” Mancini said.
He questioned why a police officer would contact immigration authorities during a traffic investigation because “immigration has nothing to do with motor vehicle law,” he said. Driving without a license is an arrestable offense, suggesting the officer could have taken the driver into custody and ascertained his identity during the booking process.
The trooper’s conduct was neither inappropriate nor unusual, Shannon Moss, a spokesperson for the Maine Department of Public Safety, said. He pulled the car over for two traffic offenses: going 84 mph in a 70 mph zone and traveling in the passing lane. If officers cannot identify a driver, they are trained to use “all available law enforcement resources” to do so, she said.
When a border protection agent who was nearby in South Portland arrived at the scene in Falmouth, he used facial recognition to identify the driver, according to the report, which said that the man had initially given the trooper an incorrect name and date of birth.
The identification process revealed that the man, whose name was redacted in the police report for privacy reasons, had a deportation warrant out of New York for having committed the crimes of strangulation and assault on a child under the age of 17, according to Moss and information that Border Protection later posted to Facebook.
“CBP continues to enforce immigration law. Those that choose to break the law will be apprehended and will face consequences including but not limited to jail time and/or removal from the United States,” a spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement in response to questions on the case.
Discoveries of undocumented immigrants with criminal history are animating Trump’s immigration crackdown, with his supporters saying law enforcement should be free to collaborate with immigration authorities to track them down. But the administration’s hardline tactics — which have fallen not just on those with criminal histories but also on collateral figures like Herrera — have prompted an emerging debate at the Maine State House.
Democrats have proposed a bill that would restrict local police from engaging in various aspects of immigration enforcement, including detaining a person on behalf of federal authorities, as well as another that would bar formal partnerships between local and federal authorities like one recently signed by the town of Wells. Republicans want to prohibit any restrictions on Maine police sharing information with immigration authorities.
“Cooperation between state and federal agencies has proven to be essential for addressing public safety concerns,” Rep. Mike Soboleski, R-Phillips, said last month.
Conversely, immigration advocates have argued that cooperation with federal agents could make immigrant communities less likely to cooperate with local police or come forward about crimes. It’s an old argument in Maine.
Two decades ago, then-Gov. John Baldacci cited that reason for why he briefly forbade state law enforcement from asking members of the public about their immigration status in a 2004 executive order, he said in a recent interview. The move came during a past political era when fears about immigrants ran high in the wake of 9/11.
Baldacci, a Democrat, said he was afraid immigrants “would be intimidated by the possibility of being deported” if they worked with police, although he rescinded the order a year later as a result of conversations that put his concerns to rest. He could not remember the details.
Spokespeople for Gov. Janet Mills did not respond to a request for comment about her position on the state police’s interactions with federal agents. A spokesperson for CBP said the agency relies on local police to help carry out its mission.
When the agent from Customs and Border Protection learned of Herrera’s uncle’s deportation order, the older man initially refused to get out of the car. Then he fled toward the toll plaza near the turnpike’s entrance, only to trip in the deep snow, according to the police report. It took both officers to wrestle him into handcuffs, the report stated.
By that time, about an hour had passed since Anstett first pulled the car over. Herrera’s mother would later tell a reporter that her son called her from the car in tears to tell her what was happening.
Callie Ferguson is the deputy investigations editor for Maine Focus, the BDN’s investigations team. She can be reached at [email protected].
