The script for the made-for-TV movie in which an ex-sheriff blasts ICE while his successor embraces federal immigration enforcement has quickly gone into rewrite.
Mark Dion, the former longtime Cumberland County sheriff and now Portland mayor who once said ICE had no place in Maine, has now switched positions.
In a rehearsed statement last week, Dion, who previously had said that federal immigration cops “have no place in our neighborhoods,” reversed himself just days later.
Suddenly Dion was now seemingly embracing ICE officers in what he conveniently distilled as their measured enforcement tactics.
“Their conduct, at least as it is currently in Maine, seems to be focused,” he said during a press conference. “They’ve identified a party, they have an address, they know who they’re looking for specifically, as opposed to this random, ‘show me your papers’ kind of experience we’re seeing in Minnesota.
“So by doing so, I don’t think we’re gonna see groupings of agents just patrolling the neighborhoods,” he said.
Meanwhile, the guy who used to be Dion’s right-hand man in the sheriff’s department as his chief deputy and who succeeded him in 2010, quickly went rogue.
Sheriff Kevin Joyce, who for months has been the lone wolf in the county seat, liberal Portland, proudly embracing ICE, changed his tune last week.
All of a sudden Joyce was blasting ICE for what he called “bush league” police work when it arrested a jail guard.
So what happened?
Politics, that’s what.
Dion had a come-to-Jesus moment when he saw the polls showing a growing number of Mainers support ICE.
As a politician who reads tea leaves – and fantasizes being governor some say – Dion realized the anti-ICE votes simply weren’t on his side.
He also feared that the city he runs would become a flashpoint for violent anti-ICE protests.
Joyce, meanwhile, also a seasoned politician, realized that once he got caught allegedly hiring an illegal the shoe was on the other foot. He had no choice but crossing the thin blue line.
So he went from vowing that he would hold federal inmates in his jail for ICE to calling the feds bush leaguers.
What a difference a day makes.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security got the last word on Joyce, saying it was removing 50 ICE-inmate detainees from his jail, a move that will cost the county $2.7 million a year.
DHS was paying the county $150 a day to house its prisoners.
