Maine Citizens Monitoring ICE Activity Say Feds Are Coming To Their Homes To Intimidate Them

Last week, we reported that the Trump administration had begun its immigration crackdown in Maine, calling its operation in the state “Operation Catch of the Day” — because someone at the Department of Homeland Security apparently thinks it’s amusing to give government actions that upend people’s lives cute and folksy titles that might obfuscate the fact that ICE and Border Patrol operations across the country have been chaotic, dehumanizing and far too often deadly.

We’ve also reported plenty about how federal agents don’t seem to get that people in the public have every right to monitor and film everything going on in public, including the activity of law enforcement. Now, not even a full week after the federal occupation of Maine officially began, ICE watchers in the state are reporting that federal agents are coming to their homes to intimidate them.

From the Portland Press Herald:

Community members began preparing for potential ICE activity in Maine back in September. On Tuesday, when the federal operation began, they started driving around the city on a daily basis.

There are similar groups in other communities all over Maine and the U.S. that are set up to monitor ICE activity, especially in the mornings and afternoons when children are going to school or coming home. 

Like the ICE watchers in Maine, Renee Good was observing federal agents in her Minneapolis neighborhood after dropping off her child when she was shot and killed by an ICE agent on Jan. 7.

The First Amendment protects people’s right to observe, monitor and record federal law enforcement, according to the National Coalition Against Censorship.

In Minneapolis, some observers said they were threatened and detained for filming federal agents.

Now, the volunteers in Maine say federal agents have started showing up at their homes and intimidating them or threatening arrest. Some of them, masked and wearing tactical gear, have issued stark warnings not to follow them.

“ This was not about law enforcement doing their job; this was about a federal agent using intimidation to discourage lawful civic activity in my own community,” Erin Cavallaro, one of the volunteers in Maine, told the Herald of agents she said came to her home. “What I was doing was lawful.”

The wild thing is that even amid the high-profile killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good in Minnesota — and the backlash this administration is drowning in over the way it has handled these tragedies — immigration agents are still pretending they don’t understand why the public is watching their every move in every city where they’re deployed.

The people are watching them because they keep proving they need to be watched! It’s really that simple.

 “Our goal is to bear witness to ICE activity in our community,” Cavallaro told the Herald. “To document what we see, and ensure transparency and accountability — not to interfere with law enforcement.”

And, again, in America, they have every right to do it.

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