Cumberland County commissioners vote to stop holding ICE detainees in county jail

After almost a year of public objections, Cumberland County will stop holding U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees in its jail. 

The Cumberland County Board of Commissioners voted 3-1 Tuesday night to remove ICE from its longstanding contract with the U.S. Marshals Service to house federal detainees in the county jail. Cumberland County Jail will continue to house other federal detainees under the contract. 

Maine’s largest jail faces mounting pressure to end contract with federal immigration authorities

“We need trust in our neighborhoods,” said Patricia Smith, commissioner for District 4. “Tonight I hope we can begin to build that trust and look ourselves in the mirror to say we’re all part of this… I feel like we have this one small piece of democracy that we can pull back tonight for ourselves.”

Smith and others credited the change to the community members who have continued to speak out against the contract at meetings over the past several months. 

“This victory shows what is possible when community comes together,” the mutual aid organization Presente! Maine said in a statement Wednesday. 

The board’s decision also comes after Gov. Janet Mills on April 13 signed into law a measure clarifying that jails can refuse to hold immigration detainees, settling the legal question that had been at the heart of the contract dispute.

Since President Donald Trump began ramping up immigration detentions, Cumberland County Jail has faced mounting pressure from community members to end the agreement, under which the federal government pays the facility to house its detainees. But the board of commissioners pushed off its decision in October, citing ambiguity as to whether they could refuse to hold federal detainees because of a decades-old state law. 

That’s the authority that the new law has settled. 

Maine law had read that municipal and county jails “shall at all times be available for detention of persons arrested by state or any other law enforcement officers.” The change adds the stipulation, “unless a person is being detained solely for a civil immigration violation,” which those who proposed the change said more accurately reflects the original intention behind the statute that was established back in 1964.

Maine jails could soon be able to refuse federal immigration detainees

Immigration detention is an administrative, or civil, form of confinement. But the line between civil and criminal detention has been blurred as the Trump administration has used both policies and rhetoric to try to characterize all undocumented immigrants as criminals.

The sole dissenting vote, District 3 Commissioner Stephen Gorden, raised concern about the financial implications of excluding ICE from the contract, noting that jails could still be required by law to hold ICE detainees if they have criminal offenses. 

“Our county not only won’t be reimbursed, but will also be required to fund those housing costs,” Gorden said. “We now have placed a record tax imposition upon our communities.” 

Speaking with Maine Morning Star, Cumberland County Sheriff Kevin Joyce said he was disappointed by the board’s vote and similarly underscored concern about the cost for taxpayers, noting that the county’s tax rate already increased last year. 

“It’s well within their purview, the county commissioners, to make that decision not to accept the money,” Joyce said. “I’m not going to suggest that they should ask me, but I don’t think it was a good idea.”

The jail currently has no ICE detainees. The federal government pulled them all from the facility in January after Joyce publicly rebuked the detention of one of his corrections officer recruits, who he said had a “squeaky clean record.” That occurred during ICE’s large-scale operation in Maine, which Joyce said led him to take issue with many of ICE’s tactics, specifically locking up asylum seekers. 

“I am against the worst of the worst, the criminals,” Joyce said. “I do support locking them up and processing them to be shipped out of the country. So, that’s why I say, if it’s a public safety matter, I’m going to continue as long as the law allows me to hold ICE inmates.” 

Both Joyce and the commissioners who voted in favor of amending the contract said the decision doesn’t change the issues many have with ICE’s tactics. 

“I do think that there needs to be the recognition that we have not stopped ICE. We have not stopped the Border Patrol,” James Cloutier of District 5 said. “The only people that can stop ICE and the Border Patrol are the people who sit in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate.”

District 2 Commissioner Tom Tyler was absent for the vote. ICE did not respond to a request for comment.