U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement won’t say how many people it has arrested in Maine since President Donald Trump took office, a day after agents arrested three people at a Bangor restaurant.
However, data from several federal agencies indicates that the overall number of arrests in Maine is almost certainly on the rise.
The attempt to figure out how many people in Maine have been taken by ICE follows a Thursday raid at a Bangor restaurant where ICE arrested three people. Reports of arrests across Maine have spread on social media but Thursday’s raid was one of the first to be documented by news organizations.
ICE will not provide local statistics about arrests and detentions, a spokesperson told the Bangor Daily News on Friday.
Statistics about arrests by region are available on ICE’s website, the spokesperson said. However, the numbers are through December 2024 and do not include Trump’s first five months in office after his campaign vow to crack down on illegal immigration.
If updated regional numbers were available from ICE, Maine would be included with Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont.
Administrative arrests — which can result in deportation but not criminal prosecution — have surged across the country since Trump took office, according to new data obtained by the Deportation Data Project at the law school at the University of California, Berkeley. The arrests are by ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations.
The data shows 100 people have been administratively arrested in Maine since Trump took office. It’s a 49 percent increase based on the daily average in 2024, according to the New York Times.
Thursday’s arrests in Bangor were done by Homeland Security Investigations, which are not included in the data from the Deportation Data Project.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection hit a 24-year arrest high in April when 113 people were taken into custody in the state.
While Border Patrol was involved in the Bangor raid Thursday, it was an HSI operation, a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said that day, while deferring all comment to ICE.
The White House claims more than 65,000 people have been arrested in Trump’s first 100 days in office.
