Each year, we are featured by dozens of local, regional, and national outlets on what changes to immigration laws and policies mean and how they impact Maine’s immigration communities. You can read our recent coverage below.
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“The ICE Out laws are a necessary and key part of Maine’s response to the federal administration,” Roche said. “They are needed to protect all of us, and to begin to repair some of the trust in Maine’s public institutions where the trust has been lost.”
Sue Roche, executive director of the Immigration Legal Advocacy Project, noted that ICE agents are federal agents, but the new laws can still govern how Mainers interact with them.
Sue Roche, with the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, said at a virtual press conference Tuesday the laws are a bulwark against federal policy. "While Maine cannot completely bar ICE from our state because that agency is under federal jurisdiction," Roche said, "we can and we must maximize the tools and protections that we have available to us at the state and local level."
Sue Roche, executive director for ILAP, said her organization was aware of more than 50 incidents in 2025 in which state and local police called immigration officials, resulting in arrests.
Lisa Parisio, policy director for the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project in Portland, said the juveniles are now living in a constant state of fear. "We have just seen and heard so many reports from families – young people of working age who are afraid to go to work, afraid to seek higher education, afraid to just start their lives," Parisio reported.
“Immigration enforcement has been at high levels since the beginning of 2025 to now, both before and after the January ICE operation,” Lisa Parisio, the policy director for the Portland-based Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, said. “Enforcement did not stop after that.”
Mainers are expressing shock and anger after a fatal shooting of a 26-year-old Colombian man in Biddeford Monday morning involving immigration enforcement officers.
The U.S. Supreme Court just concluded a term marked by major decisions on cases such as: birthright citizenship, immigrant rights, executive power, and transgender students.
The Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project in Maine said in a statement on Tuesday that the Supreme Court’s decision on birthright citizenship “got it right,” but that its ruling last week, affirming Trump’s power to remove temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of people from Syria and Haiti, creates “grave risks of family separation.”
"The administration’s attack on this fundamental right has caused tremendous harm and anxiety in our communities, as parents have lived with fear and uncertainty about their children’s citizenship, security, and future," said ILAP executive director Sue Roche. "While today’s decision affirms the rights of those vulnerable children, we know they still face grave risks of family separation with the Supreme Court’s Temporary Protected Status ruling and the administration’s ongoing mass deportation agenda."
Sue Roche, executive director of the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, said that the approximately 1.3 million people in the U.S. enrolled in the temporary protected status program include “at least hundreds of people in Maine. Many people have lived with TPS protection for years and decades, raising families, working essential jobs in our workforce, and becoming indispensable parts of our communities.”
Policy director at the Immigrant Legal, Lisa Parisio, said a TPS is used by at least 700 people in Maine, including several hundred with Haitian and Syrian designations. "This decision paves the way to impact all of these folks here in Maine and all of their families and their workplaces," Parisio said.
