The Trump administration has justified its aggressive immigration enforcement tactics as a way to crack down on crime. But in Maine, lawyers and at least one district attorney say in some cases it's actually having the opposite effect, as fear of immigration agents has led some victims and witnesses to stop cooperating with prosecutors, or to avoid reporting crimes in the first place.
Until recently, the Portland-based Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project was helping a client who had been the victim of what policy director Lisa Parisio calls "violent human trafficking."
Parisio said the man was adamant about cooperating with law enforcement.
"He just repeatedly told his attorney that he wanted to do something because he wanted to make sure his abusers weren't able to hurt anyone else," she said.
Then came the Trump administration's vast immigration crackdown.
"This young man no longer feels safe to share that information," Parisio said. "He has stopped talking to law enforcement."
In its push to make good on campaign promises of mass deportation, the Trump administration has rescinded many Biden-era limits on where immigration arrests can take place.
In recent months, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, has focused its attention on courthouses across the county, specifically immigration courts, in some cases arresting immigrants as they emerge from their hearings.
Cumberland County District Attorney Jackie Sartoris said, to her knowledge, courthouse arrests in Maine are not common. But she said the climate of fear is still deterring crime victims and witnesses from cooperating.
"People are telling us now, very specifically, that they are not engaging with us because they are - they're fearful of being picked up by ICE," she said.
Sartoris said her office has heard directly from three people who have stopped cooperating on a case based on immigration fears, and that there's about half a dozen other cases in which victims or witnesses have simply stopped returning phone calls.
She said some of these cases involve domestic violence and other forms of assault, and could now be harder to prosecute.
"That means that actually, we're kind of inadvertently preventing maybe violent, maybe dangerous people from facing the consequences of their criminal acts," Sartoris said.
This is not the first time that intensified immigration enforcement has led to a drop in crime reporting, according to Elisa Jácome, a professor at Chicago's Northwestern University.
To understand this issue, Jácome analyzed the Secure Communities program, an Obama-era initiative that increased data-sharing between local law enforcement and ICE, leading to a jump in detentions and deportations.
As the program was being rolled out, Jácome said crime reporting in Hispanic communities fell by about 30%.
"There was this perception that just immigration enforcement was ramping up, and that getting involved in any sort of interaction with law enforcement, whether that was local law enforcement or federal law enforcement, would just create this uncertainty about whether that would put you or your family or people that you knew at risk," she said.
Even as crime reporting fell, Jácome said, these same individuals were increasingly likely to become crime victims.
"If offenders know that there's these immigrant or, you know, Hispanic communities that are not so willing to call the police, they become easier to target," she said.
In fact, University of Maine law professor Anna Welch said a few ICE detainees in the state have been arrested after reporting a crime.
She said one Massachusetts woman ended up at the Cumberland County Jail after calling the police to report domestic abuse.
"I don't even believe any charges were filed against her, because it was pretty clear she was the victim of that domestic violence incident," Welch said. "And yet, ICE is outside of the police station and arrested her, and she's transferred to Cumberland County Jail."
Fear of instances such as that, Welch said, has deterred clients from showing at the courthouse to contest something as minor as a parking ticket.
Meanwhile, Cumberland County District Attorney Jackie Sartoris said all of this is eroding a key pillar of the criminal justice system: trust.
"So much of what we do is based on trust, asking people to please come and testify, to protect the community, to be willing to report a crime," she said.
Losing that trust, Sartoris said, jeopardizes public safety for everyone.
