The Maine Wire:
At a Portland town hall event Monday evening hosted by a collection of progressive nonprofit organizations, a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Maine said that he will be urging the State Legislature to pass laws protecting illegal immigrants from deportation, and compared federal immigration authorities to Nazis in 1930s Germany.
The Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition (MIRC) hosted the town hall event, entitled “Centering and Restoring The Community: Elections 2024,” at the Portland Public Library.
Speaking on the panel was Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, State Rep. Deqa Dhalac (D-South Portland), EqualityMaine Executive Director Gia Drew, and Maine ACLU policy counsel Michael Kebede.
[RELATED: Maine ACLU Says Failed Proposal to Legalize Portland Homeless Encampments with Frequent Overdoses, Assaults, and Rapes Would Have Been “Positive First Step”…]
“We’re here because there is a very consequential federal election happening in just a couple of months,” Kebede opened his remarks. “Over the last 20 years, the federal government has transformed from what it used to be into a source of moral pain, a source of regressivism.”
…
Former President Trump has made a hardline stance on illegal immigration and executing mass deportations a key part of his 2024 campaign platform, vowing that in a second term he would launch “the largest deportation in the history of our country.”
Trump’s vow has come in response to an unprecedented level of foreign nationals entering the U.S. illegally.
According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) data, encounters with illegal border-crossers increased from 1.9 million in 2021 to 3.2 million in 2023.
… On the topic of immigration, Kebede pointed to an ordinance in the City of Portland that prohibits city employees and police officers from inquiring into the immigration status of any person, a policy that was passed amid what he called “widespread racial profiling” by the federal government after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The morning of the 9-11 attacks, two of the most notorious terrorists involved in the plot — Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari — flew out of Portland International Jetport before boarding planes in Boston.
[RELATED: City of Portland Claims Migrant Crisis an “Act of God”…]
Kebede also cited an executive order issued in 2004 by then-Gov. John Baldacci (D) that established a similar policy at the state level, barring state employees, including law enforcement, from inquiring about the immigration status of individuals applying for state services, like welfare benefits or MaineCare.
“What this did was it prevented smooth cooperation between the state and the federal government in deportation efforts,” Kebede said. “It threw sand in the deportation machine, and unfortunately, the 2004 Governor Baldacci executive order was the very first thing, on his very first day, that Governor LePage repealed.”
“…[O]ne thing the ACLU hopes to see and will work for, and I hope all of you here will be interested in working toward, is trying to prevent state cooperation with all of the federal government’s deportation efforts,” Kebede said.
[RELATED: Mills Admin Seeks to Spend $2.7 Million to Boost Recruitment of ‘racial, ethnic, and linguistic minorities’ into Workforce…]
Kebede claimed that in “many cases” illegal immigrants die after they are deported back to their home country, saying that one of the reasons migrants come to the U.S. is because they are “afraid to continue living where they live for political reasons, for family reasons, maybe they’re trans.” [gotta throw that in, naturally; or unnaturally]
In cases when a migrant is in the U.S. illegally, Kebede argued that the State of Maine and local municipalities should “stop cooperating with the federal government” and say “we will not help you deport our neighbors.”
… According to the Maine ACLU website, Kebede joined the organization after working as a volunteer on the group’s campaign to legalize non-citizen voting in Portland’s local elections.
[RELATED: Mills Admin, Nonprofits, and Big Biz Back New Migrant Resettlement Agency for Maine…]
Kebede claimed that if all of the illegal immigrants were deported from the U.S., the economy would “crash and burn” and “create a global recession.”
The Maine ACLU policy counsel labeled supporters of deportation of illegal immigrants as belonging to “vile political communities,” drawing a comparison between U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the Nazi regime in 1930s Germany.
“There’s also the moral consequence of belonging to vile political communities, which I don’t think anyone one of us wants to belong to,” he said. “When history books write about us and we’re asked, ‘what were you doing when the ICE officers marched into businesses, marched into courthouses, marched into schools and took children, took their parents, and sent them back to countries where the best you can hope for is a meager survival, but in some cases where they died, what were you doing?'”
[RELATED: ‘We work very well with ICE’: Cumberland County Sheriff Defends Decision Not to Honor Immigration Detainers…]
“That kind of question was asked of many Germans who lived in the 1930s, and I would hope some of them are ashamed to say, ‘I was doing nothing, I was being entertained, and I was living a lovely life,'” he added. “That’s, I feel, what’s at stake for someone who isn’t personally or physically harmed, or doesn’t risk any kind of personal thing under the forces of neo-fascism in the United States.”
According to federal data, more illegal immigrants were deported during President Barack Obama’s time in office than under either President George W. Bush or President Donald Trump. According to the data, the U.S. processed roughly 2 million deportations under Bush, more than 3 million under Obama, and less than 1 million under Trump, though the Trump administration numbers were likely skewed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
