Maine Dems Tackle Immigration After Local ICE Murder

Charette’s childhood home in Caribou received running water in the third grade. She went to the same high school as Susan Collins, Maine’s incumbent Republican Senator up for reelection this November. Charette quit school when she was 16, like most everyone she knew, then went back for a GED and continued school to become a registered nurse, then earned a master’s degree. Today, she is a family nurse practitioner, working for years at the hospital in Fort Kent, 30 miles from Allagash, where Maine’s Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, Troy Jackson, grew up.

Charette has not voted for Collins since the senator broke an early promise to serve only two terms, and, in Charette’s words, “became rich, married a lobbyist, and forgot us.” Collins is running for a sixth term this November.

On July 25, Charette drove four hours south to the Cross Insurance Center in Bangor to serve as a delegate representing Fort Kent at the Maine Democratic Party’s nominating convention to replace Graham Platner, who withdrew his nomination on July 10 following allegations of sexual assault. It was the first time since 1918 that a Senate nominee has been replaced in Maine. Charette was one of 500 delegates apportioned among the state’s 16 counties, seated alongside 101 members of the party’s state committee.

“I’m just a regular person,” Charette says. She holds no position in the Democratic Party. When the call went out for delegates, she put her own name in.

Her story, Charette says, is the story of Aroostook County, one of the most rural counties in the most rural state in the country.

“People start with nothing and through grit and hard work they build themselves up she said. “That’s what Troy Jackson is.”

She voted for Jackson, and so did nearly everyone else. Jackson took all but five votes at the convention.

Twelve days before the convention, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero during a traffic stop in Biddeford, on Maine’s southern coast. Guerrero was 25, Colombian, and worked as a janitor and delivery driver. He had legal permission to work in the U.S. His wife and 3-year-old daughter were with him in the car when he was shot.

By the time delegates had arrived in Bangor on July 25, the Biddeford killing and migrant labor economy had become a single issue. Almost every delegate interviewed described a county economy that does not run without migrant labor and a federal agency operating in their state without restraint.

Why Maine needs immigrant labor

Aroostook County is a small window onto a statewide dependency. Immigrants are 4% of Maine’s population, according to the Migration Policy Institute, well under the 14% national share. But Maine’s population is the oldest in the country, with a median age of 44 against a national average of 37, and the states immigrants skew younger than the workforce they are joining. In Maine, 45% of residents are of prime working age, between 25 to 54, compared with 36% of the states U.S.-born residents, enough to offset a projected 5% decline in the state’s working-age population by 2030.

Migrants are concentrated in sectors where the labor shortages are worst. A third of Maine’s foreign-born working-age residents work in education and health services, compared to 27% of native-born workers, according to Census data. The biggest employers of migrant labor in Maine are in health care and hospitality. “The Big Hs,” is what Ruben Torres of the Maine Immigrant Rights Coalition (MIRC) calls them. Food processing is a close third. Luke’s Lobster, one of Maine’s better-known seafood companies, brought on so many asylum seekers that it rewrote its training manuals in several languages and color-coded them so crews could follow them on the ships, Torres says.

Those are also the workplaces ICE has been visiting. During Operation Catch of the Day, the enforcement surge that swept Maine in January, Portland hospitals were frantically trying to cover shifts, Torres says. Sanitation and nursing staff were almost entirely depleted because migrant workers were afraid to show up.

Health care workers at a vigil for Guerrero in Biddeford confirmed that report and said hospitals went uncleaned as a result.

The arrests have continued into the summer. On July 30, ICE detained Debora Kapisha, a registered nurse at Maine Medical Center in Portland, as she traveled through Boston’s Logan Airport. Her union says she is an asylum seeker with legal work authorization. More than 100 nurses and supporters, organized by the Maine State Nurses Association, rallied outside the hospital demanding her release. ICE held Kapisha for a week, releasing her this past Thursday, August 5.

Nigel Calder, a delegate from Lincoln County, along Maine’s mid-coast region, was asked what his county would look like without migrants.

“The largest single industry is the health care industry, because we’re so old,” he says. “Lincoln County is the oldest county in Maine, and Maine is the oldest state in the Union.” In health care, he says, “there’s quite a lot of migrant labor.”

Calder was not surprised to learn the reports of hospitals going uncleaned and workforce shortages. Local immigrants, he says, are “afraid to go outside. And what kind of country are we living in where people are afraid to go outside?”

Calder does not want ICE reformed. He wants it gone.

“It’s not that dissimilar in many ways to Hitler’s Brownshirts,” he says, referring to the paramilitary organization that aided the Nazi Party’s rise to power in Germany.  “It’s a rogue agency that is totally unaccountable … Kicking in doors, shooting people in the streets,” he says. “They’re completely out of control, and they need to be shut down and disbanded and defunded. There’s really no way you can reform this agency.”

Based on where he lives in predominantly blue but politically competitive Mid Coast Maine, Calder does not think this position costs Democrats anything in November. He has stood on the bridges in his town with anti-ICE signs, he says, and half the cars going by honk, wave or put their thumbs up.

“In Maine we have a tradition of we don’t lock our houses, we don’t lock our doors, we don’t lock our cars,” he says. “We have a tremendous community spirit, still. And this runs totally against that, where we’re grabbing our neighbors out of their houses and their cars and shipping them off to warehouses, processing them, putting [them] on flights out of the country. This is totally antithetical to what Maine stands for.”

Who is Troy Jackson?

Troy Jackson, a fifth-generation logger from Allagash and a former state Senate president, was not supposed to be the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate. He ran for governor this spring and finished third. The nomination belonged to Graham Platner, whose campaign collapsed in July under sexual assault allegations (which he has denied), leaving the party just over two weeks to seat a nominating convention. In a crowded hotel bar in Bangor the night before his nomination, Jackson answered questions from Barn Raiser between handshakes.

Can a Maine Democrat defend local workers and migrant workers at the same time?

“We need more workers, and more of them are going to be people who probably don’t look like me,” he said. “Immigrants need to come to Maine, as far as I’m concerned. As long as they’re going to find a job and be part of our tax base, I’m all for it.”

In 2021, Jackson successfully sponsored a bill prohibiting forest landowners and logging companies from hiring immigrants from Canada to work in Maine, claiming they were depriving Maine workers of jobs by illegally paying foreign laborers less than domestic workers, Maine Public reported. That law was later blocked by a federal judge.

Asked if running on abolishing ICE would win him voters in November, Jackson pointed to Biddeford.

“If you keep killing people in the streets, I think it will,” he said. “A young man with a family that was working as a janitor got killed, murdered. It wasn’t even the guy they were looking for.”

Maine’s response to ICE

In response to January’s Operation Catch of the Day, Maine’s legislature passed LD 1971, a bill barring state and local law enforcement from assisting federal immigration enforcement. Sponsored by Democratic state Rep. Deqa Dhalac of South Portland, it cleared the legislature in June. Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, declined to sign it. A spokesperson for the governor said that “the bill is both overly broad and confusing, as it establishes a complicated legal regime of the type of interactions that are or are not permitted with federal law enforcement.” It became law without her signature on July 29, four days after the convention.

Dhalac, a Somali immigrant and naturalized U.S. citizen, became the first African-born female mayor in the U.S. when she was elected mayor of South Portland in 2021, which is in the same district she currently represents.

“[ICE agents] are here and they are really killing American citizens and stopping American citizens. So, somebody like me, who’s a U.S. citizen, I’m carrying my passport in case I get stopped,” Dhalac tells Barn Raiser at the convention.

The administration said it would deport people who had committed crimes, Dhalac says, and that is not what has happened.

“They’re going after everybody who looks like me. Black and brown human beings, mostly.” If ICE were actually arresting people who had committed crimes, she says, she would support it. “I am all for it. I am standing behind that. But that’s not exactly what they’re doing.”

She says the state legislature should do everything in its power to put guardrails to protect not only migrant workers but the community at large.

“If one of us is not safe, all of us are not safe,” she says.

Grayson Lookner, a delegate and state representative from Portland, spoke with Barn Raiser at Jackson’s after-party at the Eastern Maine Labor Council union hall just outside of Bangor. He calls LD 1971 the bare minimum the legislature could have done. He has spent the past year failing to get more.

Lookner says in November legislative leadership voted 6-3 to block his bill LR 2591 reaching a public hearing, which would have barred law enforcement from wearing masks that conceal their identities. Lookner proposed it after agents in vests marked “POLICE” detained a parent outside a Portland elementary school in September 2025 and refused to tell school staff which agency they worked for.

A second Lookner bill, LR 2642, which called for pulling state funding from the Maine National Guard if it were deployed to deportation campaigns in other states, met the same end. Democrats control both chambers of the Maine State Legislature.

Portland without migrant labor “would come screeching to a halt,” Lookner says, starting with the restaurant’s the city is known for and through to hotels, seafood packing and the certified nursing assistants an aging state depends on.

Until the $70 billion for ICE that Collins supported is repealed, he says, nothing will change.

“We’re just going to continue to see this kind of thing, like what happened in Biddeford,” he says. “And that’s where we’ve got to pull the plug on the money.”

Maine can bar its own officers from assisting ICE, as LD 1971 seeks to do, but ICE answers to Washington, and its money moves through the Senate Appropriations Committee, which Collins chairs.

Collins has held her seat since 1997. She ranks seventh in Senate seniority and is the longest serving Republican woman in the chamber’s history. In June, she voted for a $70 billion appropriation funding ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) through the end of Trump’s term.

Collins has answered the criticism of the Biddeford killing by pointing to safeguards she authored herself. The $90 billion Department of Homeland Security funding bill she shepherded through the Appropriations Committee, signed April 30, included $20 million for body-worn cameras along with $2 million for de-escalation training and $20 million for oversight of detention facilities.

Three months later, Collins met with acting ICE director David Venturella and said afterward that every agent in the field would have a camera by the end of August, with delivery to Maine prioritized at her request. The agents who stopped Durán Guerrero were wearing body cameras, but they were not turned on.

Somerset County

On a Tuesday morning in February, a bus was carrying workers from a former motel in Skowhegan to Backyard Farms in Madison, a hydroponic tomato grower housed in a glass greenhouse the size of 30 football fields. Border Patrol agents stopped the bus near the workers’ housing. Between 17 and 19 workers were taken, according to the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition.

David Cochrane, a delegate from York County, the state’s southernmost county, runs a cafe in Old Orchard Beach and lives in Saco, the next town over from Biddeford. He buys his tomatoes from Backyard Farms in Madison. After February they went up $2 a pound, he says, because the greenhouse had lost so many of the people who worked there.

“I think this affects the price of goods, if nothing else. If people want to think of it in a financial sense and not in a humane sense,” he says. “The treatment of people affects your pocket.”

The workers on the bus had papers and were authorized to work, says Cynthia Soma-Hernandez, a delegate from Somerset County running for House District 72. Somerset County stretches from central Maine to the Canadian border and has voted for Trump three times.

“I think we need immigrants in America. That’s what America’s all about.”

Soma-Hernandez does not think ICE will stop at immigrants. The agents are poorly trained, she says, and nobody is holding them to account.

“They could easily start saying, well, we’re going to go after the communists, and everybody knows the communists are in the Democratic Party,” she says. “It’s like the McCarthy era all over again.”

Colin MonahanMore by this author →

Colin Monahan is a freelance journalist reporting on labor, social movements, and conflict in the United States and abroad.