Maine Democratic Congresswoman Chellie Pingree said key questions remain unanswered after an oversight visit to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Scarborough on Monday. The visit comes amid renewed scrutiny of ICE actions under the Trump Administration.
Read MoreLisa Parisio, with the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, said many of those arrested posed no threat. "Many of the impacted Maine residents who have been in this situation were in lawful immigration processes, they had valid work permits and they had absolutely no criminal record.”
Read More“This informal assistance is the vast majority of the immigration assistance that we are seeing here in the state,” said Lisa Parisio. There is no centralized tracking method for seeing the full extent of these incidents, according to Parisio.
Read MoreWhy Dozens of Local Police Agencies in New England are Patrolling the Northern Border.
Read MoreUntil recently, the Portland-based Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project was helping a client who had been the victim of what policy director Lisa Parisio calls "violent human trafficking."
Parisio said the man was adamant about cooperating with law enforcement.
"He just repeatedly told his attorney that he wanted to do something because he wanted to make sure his abusers weren't able to hurt anyone else," she said.
Read MoreThe 268 faith-based, non-governmental, and other civil society organizations listed below call on UN Member States to uphold, preserve, strengthen, and celebrate international refugee, human rights, and humanitarian treaties and reject efforts to undo or undermine legal norms.
Read MoreMelissa Brennan is co-legal director at the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project.
On a recent sunny morning in Portland, Maine, elementary school students were arriving at Talbot Community School when something unthinkable happened. An unidentified law enforcement agent, later confirmed to be working on behalf of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), arrested a parent who had just dropped off their child.
Read More“As a Portland Public Schools parent, I’m deeply concerned about the trauma that current federal policy inflicts on children, families and educators. There is no reason that this ICE arrest needed to happen in the Talbot School driveway. It did not make our communities safer. It makes them weaker, more divided and more afraid.”
Read More
