Black in Maine during an ICE surge

I have long considered myself a reluctant Mainer. I often refer to myself as a Chicagoan exiled in Maine. I never set out to be known for anti-racism work; I never set out to become someone known as a local leader, an activist, an organizer, or even a social justice writer.

Rather, life dealt me an unfortunate hand that provided me with an impossible choice. It turns out there are always consequences for our actions. At 18, I ran off and married a white boy whose family was from Maine and Massachusetts. A true starter marriage that would have not had much impact on my life except that months after getting married we would learn I was pregnant. Two weeks after turning 19, I would give birth to my son. The marriage fell apart around our son’s second birthday. We would divorce, I would remarry when my son was 5, and that would lead to a post-divorce custody battle that led to either staying in my hometown of Chicago and spending even more money on a custody battle than I had at that point—thus creating greater harm for my then-young son—or pack up my life and move to Maine, where my ex-husband was with our son, and work on creating an amiable relationship that would allow my son access to both his parents.

I chose the latter, projecting that I could handle a roughly eight-year stint in Maine until my son turned 18 and then I could get the hell out of dodge and go back to Chicago or, really, anywhere but Maine.

The idea of living in Maine was as appealing to me as a stint in prison, so much so that for years I used to jokingly tell people that I was in the witness protection program and that was why a Black girl from Chicago was in Maine. I am certain at least a few people thought I was telling the truth.

Here’s the thing: I didn’t have anything against Maine; it’s just that the Maine I arrived at in 2002 was quaint and oh-so-white. I landed in Maine before Portland exploded into an internationally known foodie scene. Portland, Maine, in 2002 was frankly a bit gritty. It was a place wholly foreign to me and based on the looks I received like clockwork when I left the safety of my home—especially in the small city I lived in for years, which was 25 minutes from Portland and even whiter—my presence as a young Black woman was apparently foreign to the white folks I would encounter.

It was those encounters and the utter sense of isolation in my first year in Maine that launched what would eventually become my writing career. I pitched the idea of a column about a Black woman moving to Maine to multiple publications, only one bit on the concept and for over a decade, I wrote a column for the now-defunct Portland Phoenix called “Diverse City.” A few years after starting my column, I would start a blog in 2008, initially writing more in depth about raising Black kids and living as a Black woman in the whitest state in the country.

I wrote to save my sanity. I wrote to have a healthy outlet for the anger I felt for living in a place I didn’t want to be. It was a hobby, but it became a lifeline for me and eventually a place for other Black folks in Maine in predominantly white spaces to find comfort and knowledge. Later, when I made the leap from managing and consulting to non-profits to becoming the director of an anti-racism organization, it shifted my writing because I could write more extensively about racism and, over time, my readership would shift to white folks wanting to learn and unpack white supremacy.

In my almost 24 years in Maine, I have watched this state change for the better. Just as I was settling into the state in 2002, it was around that time that Somali refugees started moving into the state, primarily settling into the city of Lewiston. By late 2003, there were those in Lewiston who were in an uproar over the new arrivals and the then-mayor wrote a public letter urging the newcomers to stop coming to the city. For a brief time, racial tensions were high but in many ways what the newcomers at that time faced were not unlike what Franco-Canadians had experienced over a hundred years earlier. Turns out Maine has always had moments of adjusting to outsiders but eventually newcomers are received and become a part of the community and state.

Until recently, that is exactly what happened over the last twenty-plus years. For a white state with an aging population, it turned out that newcomers were very much needed and ultimately welcomed. While Maine remains the whitest state, that statement alone doesn’t describe just how much more vibrant our state has become as it has become more racially diverse. Immigrants in Maine have breathed life into this state, old Mill towns like Biddeford and Lewiston are being rejuvenated by the presence of immigrants, and our education systems and healthcare systems are all the better for their presence.

Which is why the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants and now the state of Maine are devastating.

Since the administration decided that Somali-Americans are the enemy and to send federal agents into states like Minnesota and now Maine, our lives have been turned upside-down. It was a little over two weeks ago that I received a message that ICE agents were going to be setting up shop in Maine. Several credible sources told me that ICE was coming though it took mainstream local media longer to tell the public. That first week we were in disbelief; after all, Maine is a small state. Geographically we are large—the size of all the other New England states combined—but the total population of people is pretty much the size of my hometown of Chicago. Given the demographics, the idea of ICE coming to Maine always seemed to be a stretch. Granted, there are those who had been preparing for this moment since last summer and had systems ready to go should an invasion happen but still, Maine is a small place and a big city-style operation like we had seen in other cities just seemed out of place.

Well, last week the agents arrived and it has been life-altering. While the administration is calling their reign of terror in Maine “Operation Catch of the Day” and is supposedly targeting criminals with bad records (the worst of the worst, they say), what has happened is that people who are in this country lawfully but are not U.S. citizens are being snatched off the street—literally.

In some cases, cars have been left running with keys in the ignition in the roadway. Like a horror movie, when bodies are just snatched by zombies.

To date, some of the more well-known cases I am aware of involve corrections officers in two different counties who are legally authorized to work in this country, a single mother of four who works in the Portland Public School Systems, an engineer who received his graduate degree in Maine, and an 18-year-old college student whose family were asylum seekers. The student apparently got into a fender-bender in a grocery store parking lot, something that almost every driver will experience at some point, but he was taken by ICE for the crime of a minor accident and is now being held in a facility in Louisiana. Also, immigrant employees at an Asian restaurant, snatched up in such numbers (despite being here legally) that reservations had to be canceled. By all accounts, almost every abduction whose story is known involves someone who followed the rules and was legally present in this country. The only common denominator is that none of the ICE victims are citizens…yet.

Those who have witnessed these abductions and attempted abductions are being threatened and intimidated by these so-called agents. I saw a video that hasn’t been publicly shared of a white man who shares several mutual connections with me and who works in law enforcement being escorted home after he dared to record these so-called agents. Guess he got the professional courtesy special. A nod without words that they can come back for him.

As a result of the last two weeks, our largest cities feel like ghost towns as immigrants disappear from public life. Our streets are most certainly not safer as many of these agents are driving manically through the streets of towns looking for people to scoop up. Many also appear unable to navigate winter driving. Our largest healthcare system has reported record call-outs. A physician friend has reported colleagues who are physicians but not white are also scared. While many immigrants are living in fear, the truth is all of us who are not white or visibly white-presenting or white-passing are also living in fear.

I don’t know any non-white person in Maine at this moment who hasn’t altered their daily rounds. In the last week alone, I canceled several plans and planned for my ex-husband to get my groceries. We asked our racially ambiguous-looking Black biracial daughter to pause going any place alone. I am carrying my birth certificate with me because I know being born in this country is no bulwark against getting stopped but it might save me from being snatched. To these agents, they just see a middle-aged Black woman; in their minds, I could be from a host of places other than my Chicago-Arkansas-Texas roots.

Last night, a well-known Maine Black-owned business announced that they were pausing part of their operations and taking down their website. Their business is named Black Owned Maine—they are a bit of a chamber of commerce for Black businesses in Maine as well as the creator of the invaluable directory, “Black Owned Maine,” that lists every Black Maine business in Maine. In the climate with an ICE surge underway, BOM felt that keeping their website and directory up was posing a threat to many in Maine’s Black community.

In the last several days, I have heard from several Black community members who are not immigrants asking: What can we do?

Maine’s Black community is a mix of Black immigrants from a host of countries as well as those Black folks born and raised in this country and right now, we are all under attack. While those of us born and raised here understand none of this is new—as our parents, grandparents, elders, and ancestors experienced state-sponsored racism and denial of humanity—it still doesn’t take away from the fear of the moment. Though, for many of us, that fear is turning to anger and rage.

Initially, I was scared and filled with “what ifs,” but in the past several days, I feel the ancestral energy of my ancestors strengthen me. I feel the epigenetic trauma as I feel the visceral pain of how many times did my grandparents, my father and aunts and uncles have to feign deference to white men in Arkansas to stay safe?

I am reminded once again that the official end of Jim Crow was less than 10 years before my birth and yet, here we are again. On the precipice of Jim Crow 2.0.

The ancestral link in this moment between my ancestors and the ancestors of these agents is fully present in my body after a local report of two ICE agents trying to drink at a local Portland brewery and being chased out by locals who realized that the two men were almost certainly ICE agents after telling fellow bar-goers that they were in town from Arkansas to build a children’s hospital.

No one is building shit in Maine in January and why would contractors be hired from Arkansas given the blue-collar nature of this state and. Yeah…what children’s hospital? There’s a public video circulating of the two-gentleman fleeing the brewery saying nothing because it seems when they are unmasked and without their weapons and uniforms, they are nothing but sad white men who hold racist views and no power. These men are no doubt holding the energy of their ancestors as they seek to restore the power they think whiteness holds and that they believe should rule over all, not understanding that they are merely tools for men who don’t see their humanity either. Whiteness is no longer paying the dividends it once did.

I have spent a lot of time on my Substack writing about the actions of the day with this administration but today, I am sitting in the feeling. Yet another collective assault of sorrow, pain, and trauma is once again being inflicted upon the African diaspora by white supremacy and its agents.

Right now, based on the tactics we have seen in other locales these agents will stop and attempt to detain anyone who doesn’t fit their idea of an American. They are also stalking and stalling out any location that immigrants and people of color are likely to go, including the grocery store. Food is something we all need and yet these ghouls are looking to take our most base needs as an opportunity to snatch up people and create fear so intense that even me, a well-known figure in Maine, is nervous about going to get groceries.

This ain’t living, and attempting to go about our daily rounds knowing we can be terrorized or worse isn’t acceptable. It’s not even healthy; it is just another manifestation of an unhealthy society that is undergirded by white supremacy.

While there are hundreds of white community members and allies rising to the occasion to keep those at most imminent risk of being targeted as safe as possible, we also need a collective acknowledgement of the widespread harm that is being done across the state—and really country—regardless of immigration status. We also need allies to realize that while this is shocking to witness, this moment is the result of supremacy that has never been gutted.

This moment isn’t just a fight against the administration; it is a war for the soul and future of this country. It is the crossroads of who we might become, or the collapse of this experiment called the United States. Community and care are vital at this moment but so is the envisioning of something better that seeks to repair harm and create wellness. It is letting go of what no longer serves us, moving beyond fear and to a collective rage that allows for the creation of something better.

As a Black Mainer and American, while I hold fear, I refuse to be overwhelmed by that fear. Instead, I remember our collective Black history and look backwards at our history in this country to know that we hold the collective weight to build together and not allow ourselves to be divided as they did hundreds of years ago when they took us from the motherland and divided our souls among many places before arriving on these shores. We survived the whips, chains, and all the ways they built in law to dehumanize us, and yet we rose and we still rise.

Just as I refuse to give in to fear, I urge white people not to give into a false comfort of the past. White supremacy is what got us here and it’s baked into almost all of our institutions and systems. If you want to be free of ICE and the other atrocities of the regime in D.C. and make a better and stronger society, it’s time to realize that white supremacy is as bad for you in the long run as it is for people like me.

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