Wells’ aging liberals have banded together in recent months to stage weekly protests against the police department’s paused collaboration agreement with immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to a Monday New York Times report.
The protesters have gathered alongside Wells’ Route One since April, according to the Times, in what has now become a weekly event featuring a variety of signage directed at drivers who likely have no ability to impact immigration policies even if they are convinced by protester’s handmade posters.
Signs featured boilerplate left-wing anti-ICE slogans such as “No ICE in our community,” or “Fight ignorance, not immigrants.”
Activists from the well-off town with a median household income of $83k and median age of 52, expressed concern that ICE raids, and the enforcement of immigration law, could lead to the loss of service workers in hotels or restaurants, many of whom are foreigners.
The Times spoke with two business owners who expressed their support for foreign-born workers in Maine.
Jillian Shomphe, president of the local Congdon’s Doughnuts, has eight foreign workers in the U.S. under H-2B work visas. She told the newspaper that she would hire more foreigners if she could find them housing, and appeared to defend that position with the claim that “they like it here.”
A business owner born in India who owns 11 hotels across the state claimed that the entirety of the Maine coast would collapse if businesses stopped importing foreigners to work service jobs.
One Wells protest, held outside the town’s public safety building last Monday, drew nearly 100 people, including Rep. Michele Meyer (D-Eliot) to decry the Wells Police Department’s April decision to become the first Maine town to sign on to a collaboration program with ICE agents that allows local law enforcement to operate as immigration officers.
“We’re here simply to support the immigrants in our communities and to let anyone out there seeing us gathered here today peacefully know we care,” said Rep. Meyer speaking at the protest.
That event was organized by Indivisible, a national non-profit dedicated to fighting president Donald Trump’s agenda. According to Influence Watch, the non-profit has received over $8 million from Democrat megadonor George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and has ties to the Democratic Socialists of America, Planned Parenthood, and multiple other prominent left-wing groups.
The weekly protests began in response to Wells Police Chief Jo-Ann Putnam’s decision to partner with ICE. They have apparently been successful, leading Putnam to walk back her ICE compact just one month after it was agreed.
“I’d like to reiterate that at no point was there ever any intent on doing proactive immigration enforcement,” said Putnam. Earlier, Chief Putnam had praised the agreement as as giving officers “another tool in their toolbox” and said it offers “a safer way to deal with designated criminal aliens,” according to a report in The Daily Caller.
The Daily Caller report over the flap summed up the protestors’ ire as being driven out of fear of losing low-paid labor should aggressive immigration enforcement practices continue.
The ICE agreement remains on hold, and the Wells Police Department has not actively participated in any ICE enforcement activities. Nevertheless, protesters remain unsatisfied.
