AUGUSTA, Maine — ICE wasn’t created by Donald Trump. It was created by Congress in 2003 under the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11, built to enforce immigration law and investigate cross-border crime. What’s changed isn’t the agency’s story of origin, or even the fact that it enforces laws written by Congress. What’s changed is the narrative, and in Maine, that narrative has turned ICE from a federal law enforcement agency into a culture-war villain, with Gov. Janet Mills (D) and public schools increasingly drawn into the conflict.
The irony is that modern deportation enforcement was built with bipartisan fingerprints long before the “Abolish ICE” era. The Clinton-era Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 expanded removal authority and accelerated deportation procedures, legal tools that still shape enforcement today.
The Obama years are often remembered for DACA and immigration reform rhetoric, but they were also defined by record removals. Deportations hit a modern-era peak in fiscal year 2013, when DHS data showed 438,421 deportations, the highest annual total at the time, according to Pew Research. During that era, Thomas Homan, then a senior ICE enforcement official, received a 2015 Presidential Rank Award for Distinguished Service, an honor ICE publicly highlighted in a 2016 release and one that has resurfaced in today’s political argument over enforcement.
Trump didn’t create ICE, but he turned immigration enforcement into a defining political brand. The border became a centerpiece issue, and enforcement stopped being a back-page federal function and became a daily political identity test. Supporters called it law and order. Critics called it cruelty. Either way, ICE became campaign material, and once an agency becomes a symbol, reality gets flattened into slogans.
Maine’s current flashpoint detonated after the Trump administration launched an “enhanced” enforcement surge in the state that federal officials and multiple outlets reported led to more than 200 arrests, widely branded “Operation Catch of the Day.” The operation triggered protests, backlash from local leaders, and a political escalation that put Mills squarely in the anti-ICE spotlight.
Mills didn’t just criticize the optics. She publicly challenged the legality and transparency of the operation, demanding warrants and warning that separating mothers from children “solely because they sought freedom here and have committed no crime” would be “sowing intimidation and fear.” After Sen. Susan Collins said DHS Secretary Kristi Noem told her the enhanced operations were over, Mills continued pressing for details on who was detained and why, while arguing the enforcement surge was destabilizing communities.
At the same time, Maine’s anti-ICE narrative moved from rallies and press conferences into schools. On Feb. 2, students at five Midcoast high schools walked out of class and converged on the Sagadahoc Bridge in Bath with signs protesting federal immigration enforcement, a weekday demonstration tied directly to school walkouts, not a weekend rally.
The spillover has not been merely symbolic. In Lewiston, school officials reported that student attendance dropped during the enforcement surge. School leaders described a noticeable rise in absences as families kept children home out of fear connected to the federal immigration operation. The attendance drop underscored how enforcement activity was reaching beyond policy debate and into daily school operations and family routines.
In Portland, the political backlash escalated beyond rhetoric into housing policy. The Portland City Council and Mayor Mark Dion voted unanimously to urge Mills to declare a state of emergency and impose a 60-day eviction moratorium, effectively a temporary pause on rent-related evictions. Supporters argued that heightened enforcement activity was keeping people from going to work, disrupting paychecks, and putting renters at risk of losing housing.
This is the pressure point critics keep returning to. They argue schools are no longer simply educating students while adults debate policy, they are becoming staging grounds where the message that ICE is inherently harmful is absorbed as a moral cause and acted out through organized walkouts. Supporters of the protests counter that students are reacting to fear and instability in their communities and exercising free speech. But the net effect is undeniable: the immigration fight is no longer confined to Congress, courts, or federal agencies. It is being fought in school hallways, on bridges, and at city council microphones.
In that environment, immigration enforcement does not have to change for perceptions to change. The statutes remain. The enforcement framework still bears Clinton-era architecture. The record-removal reality of the Obama era still exists in the data. A top ICE official was still receiving a major federal award during a Democratic administration. Yet in 2026 Maine, ICE is treated less like a law enforcement agency and more like a political character, the kind that can be used to mobilize voters, pressure institutions, and turn routine governance into ideological warfare.
ICE did not become a political villain because Congress rewrote history. It became a villain because woke politics rewrote the story, and Maine is now one of the places where that story is being written in real time.
