The number of detainees in ICE custody has grown to 66,000. According to the Trump administration, about half do not have a criminal record. That was the case for a Brazilian man from Searsport detained following a traffic stop this past spring. His arrest sparked a public outcry, and family members and activists aggressively pushed for his release. He's now back home, thanks at least in part to the efforts his U.S.-born fiancée - who is now his wife.
Around 9 p.m. on May 26, Memorial Day, a Maine state trooper pulled over a van on I-295 in Scarborough. In the incident report, the trooper said the van had no front license plate, one of the plate lights was defective, and that neither of the two men in the car were licensed to drive. The trooper later noted that the vehicle did have a front plate, but that it was not properly placed.
When the two men in the car presented Brazilian passports and I.D. cards, the trooper called Border Patrol to verify the documents. A Border Patrol agent arrived and took both men into custody.
"Just step out of the vehicle and put the handcuffs [on] and then get inside the car," is what Lucas Segobia, who was a passenger van, remembers the Border Patrol agent saying.
Segobia is a carpenter who lives in Searsport, and said he was driving back to Maine from New Jersey with a friend, headed to a jobsite in Bar Harbor. In a statement at the time of the arrest, a Border Patrol spokesperson said Segobia had overstayed a tourist visa, and that neither he nor his friend had legal status.
Segobia said he was shuttled between jails before ending up at a Border Patrol station in Fort Fairfield.
"They put us in a cell. It was like, 12 people inside the cell," he said.
A couple days later, he said, they were all put on an airplane, but were not told where they were being taken.
"They just hide everything, all the information, put you on a plane and send you to somewhere else," Segobia said.
Somewhere else, in this case, turned out to be an ICE detention facility in Texas.
Segobia said he knew that his visa had expired, and was seeking permanent legal status through his mother, a Green Card holder.
His lawyer, Luana Morine, said Segobia had no criminal record, only traffic violations. She said detaining people in Segobia's situation - and shuttling them around the country - is a tactic aimed at making it more difficult for them to mount a legal defense.
"To really convince individuals who generally would have a legal pathway to becoming a resident, and eventually a U.S. citizen here in the United States, to give up," she said.
But Morine said Segobia also had another clear pathway to legal status - through his fiancée Laura Anderson, an American citizen that he planned to marry later in the year. Anderson organized a press conference shortly after Segobia's arrest to draw attention to the case, and to other immigrant workers arrested by Border Patrol.
"How ironic that we need these workers to build our homes, make our food and clean our houses, yet we turn our backs on them," she said, to a crowd of dozens gathered outside Portland city hall on May 30th. "They do not have a voice, in fear of this reality that is currently happening in our country. Well, I am not afraid, and I will use my voice to speak for them."
After the arrest, the couple decided to accelerate their wedding plans. Anderson worked the phones relentlessly to track Segobia's movements between jails. And once he was transferred to Texas, she requested permission from ICE administrators to hold a ceremony, and headed south from Maine in her car.
"I wrote a letter saying that 'I, Laura Anderson, drove almost 3000 miles to be here in Texas with him. I'm not being paid to do this,'" she recalled.
She said they were married at the Karnes County Immigration Processing Center alongside a handful of other couples, with guards present. The families were given about an hour to mingle, before Segobia and the other detainees were taken away.
A few weeks later, an immigration judge granted Segobia's bond request, finding that he was neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community, and that he would likely be eligible for immigration relief through his marriage.
His lawyer, Luana Morine, believes he has a strong case.
"I'm very confident that he will eventually obtain status in the United States through his marriage, and, you know, he can live with all of the benefits of being a legal resident in this country," she said.
At home in Searsport, Segobia said he feels like his life is slowly restarting. But he said he lost some of the jobs he had been working on before his detention, and has to reckon with the fear of being re-arrested.
"You feel good to be able to go outside and come back to life," he said. "But you can feel feel like, oh, they can come and arrest me again anytime."
Still, he said, he's luckier than his friend who was arrested with him back in May, and, after several weeks at the same detention facility in Texas, deported to Brazil.
