Around 100 people rallied in downtown Portland today in support of immigrants' rights.
Jakob Flores, a student at Maine College of Art and Design, said the issue is personal to him, because his parents and many of his family members are Mexican immigrants. He said the threat of a relative getting deported is a constant fear.
"It used to be an 'if' question. And now it's become, when are we gonna have family members be abducted, if we're going to even be able to find them, and if they're even going to be deported back to where they came from, because a lot of people are being deported to countries that they have no ties to," he said.
Flores said it was nerve-wracking to protest publicly as one of the only Latino people at the rally, but that he feels a duty to use his relative privilege as a U.S. citizen to advocate for others.
Molly Jones, of Portland, said she's seeing the effects of President Trump's aggressive immigration enforcement here in Maine.
"My family knows somebody who was taken by ICE not too long ago," she said. "And then somebody who works at the same business that I do was also taken. It just feels like every day you hear about it."
According to the Deportation Data Project, ICE has arrested over 100 people in Maine since Trump took office, a significant jump compared to the previous year's arrest rate.
