U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) took five suspected illegal aliens into federal custody at Maine’s Cumberland County Jail on Monday.
Booking records at the Cumberland County Jail show that five inmates booked at the jail in a single day on Monday, Jan. 27, have a judicial status that indicates the inmate is in the custody of ICE or has had an immigration detainer lodged against them.
ICE lodges immigration detainers against unlawfully present noncitizens who have been arrested on criminal charges and who the agency has probable cause to believe are deportable from the U.S.
Those individuals taken into custody by ICE at the jail were:
- Mauricio Romeu, 45, no residence given;
- Claudia Murcia, 45, of El Salvador;
- Zeneyda Barrera Hernandez, 18, no residence given;
- Maria Rodezno-Marin, 36, of Honduras;
- Joselyn Ramon Granda, 22, of Philipsburg, Penn.
The judicial status of “INS” means that the inmate is in ongoing removal or other immigration proceedings, or is subject to an ICE immigration detainer.
When the arresting agency is listed as INS, it means that ICE was the agency that brought the inmate to the jail for some sort of federal hold.
[RELATED: Maine ACLU Lawyer Likens ICE to Nazi Germany, Urges State to Block Illegal Immigrant Deportations…]
The Maine Wire reported in August that ICE had designated Cumberland County Jail as being in “limited cooperation” with the agency and their detainers.
Cumberland County Sheriff Kevin Joyce has said that while it has been his policy not to comply with ICE detainers since 2017, the jail regularly holds inmates of ICE.
“We work very well with ICE and we hold their inmates on a routine basis,” Joyce told the Maine Wire in August.
While the jail stopped honoring ICE detainers in 2017, Sheriff Joyce said ICE agents come to the jail to arrest the inmate themselves to ensure the agency has probable cause for taking that inmate into custody.
The five arrests on Monday come just a week after President Donald Trump took office and signed a series of executive orders aimed at cracking down on illegal immigration.
ICE has been posting daily updates on the number of illegal aliens they have arrested and detained each day of the Trump administration.
This Monday, ICE posted that they had arrested 1,179 individuals and lodged 853 detainers — the highest daily total so far, and of which the arrests at the Cumberland County Jail were part.
