ICE Out of Policing

Document Date: September 21, 2026

With help from local governments, the second Trump administration has dramatically increased the rate at which the federal government arrests and detains non-citizens.

Federal immigration enforcement agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) rely on collaboration with local governments to increase the number of people in immigration detention in three key ways:

  • By entering into formal contracts in which local jails agree to detain people for ICE or CBP. These contracts expand the number of people ICE and CBP can keep detained.
  • By relying on jail staff to inform ICE or CBP when an immigrant is about to be released from the jail. These communications allow federal immigration authorities to detain the immigrants the moment they are released.
  • By issuing detainers. Detainers allow jails to keep an immigrant in custody when they should otherwise be released, often until ICE or CBP can come to the jail and take the person into immigration custody.

These practices have real effects: the more people ICE can detain, the more people ICE arrests. In Maine, ICE’s increased activity has led to multiple tragedies, including dozens of violent arrests during January 2026’s “Operation Catch of Day,” and the July 2026 killing of Johan Duran Guerrero in Biddeford.

In response to "Operation Catch of the Day" and similar ICE brutalities across the country, our legislature enacted a new law: ICE Out of Policing. This law dramatically limits how our state and local law enforcement agencies can use their resources to carry out the Trump administration’s immigration agenda. The new law came into effect on July 29, 2026.

To learn how and whether law enforcement agencies are following the new law, we submitted FOAA requests to every county jail before the law took effect. These requests sought to identify practices or policies Maine jails have engaged in that would now violate ICE Out of Policing. We learned that some jails had already created policies to implement the new law, while others still have contracts or practices that now violate the law. Below, find the results of our requests.