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Border patrol removes 17 undocumented immigrants from Maine house

Border patrol agents in Maine removed 17 undocumented immigrants from a house in Lisbon earlier this week.

According to a press release from the agency, the migrants are from Nicaragua and Guatemala and worked for a Massachusetts company, which rented the house.

Chief patrol agent of the Houlton sector, William Maddocks, says agents are seeing a sharp increase in the flow of illegal labor in and out of Maine. In a written statement, he called housing 17 people in one house "unsafe and degrading."

Border Patrol was alerted to the undocumented immigrants by Lisbon Police, who discovered them in the course of a hit-and-run traffic investigation.

The 17 individuals face removal proceedings. Two of them were previously removed from the U.S. Re-entering the country illegally is a felony crime.