Up close, the dinginess of the home at 93 Main St. in Lisbon comes into focus.

Cigarette butts, eggshells and a Poland Springs bottle half-filled with an orange liquid decorate the house’s little yard. A broken window pane welcomes in the cold spring air. A rat scurries across the steps and dives into a hole in the building’s foundation.

Yet from the street, the house at the corner of Bibber and Main looks about the same as all the other homes on the sleepy block.

A neighbor says he never much noticed 93 Main’s tenants, who mostly came out of the building only to go to work at their roofing job or to shovel out the many vehicles that often lined the driveway.

Lisbon police never had any reason to note the men, either, until an investigation into a hit-and-run incident led officers back to the house, Chief Ryan McGee said. Even when that visit sparked suspicion that the home’s residents were undocumented migrants, McGee and his team did not imagine what their tip to Border Patrol would uncover.

On the evening of March 21, agents from the Rangeley Border Patrol Station found and detained 17 migrant workers from Guatemala and Nicaragua living together in the four-bedroom duplex, 2,300 miles from the nation’s southern border.

“Border Patrol Infiltrates Elaborate Human Smuggling Scheme,” proclaimed a department news release, which referred to 93 Main St. as a “stash house.” It claimed the migrants “add to a growing trend of undocumented non-citizens transiting in and out of the State of Maine.”

The residents are now gone from their Lisbon home. But for many advocates around the region, urgent questions remain unanswered: Who are these men? What is the unnamed Massachusetts company that employed them and packed them into a rental house? Why can’t anyone seem to find out where they are now?

A GROWING TREND?

Conversations about immigration near the northern border may be infrequent compared with the politically charged debates about the Southwest, but New England Border Patrol agents are increasingly coming into contact with undocumented workers, said William Maddocks, chief patrol agent of the Houlton Sector.

The number of U.S. Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol encounters with migrants in Maine more than doubled to 9,700 from fiscal 2021 to 2022, according to department data. So far this year, encounters are up another 74%.

People choose to migrate based on several “push-and-pull factors,” the perceived benefits of one location versus another, Maddocks said. He declined to elaborate on what might be drawing more immigrants to Maine and other northern New England states but added that even baseless internet rumors about the benefits of one place could have an impact in certain situations.

The Lisbon findings, he said, marked a startling escalation of the trend his team has been monitoring for the past few years.

“In my time in Maine, I’ve not encountered a house with that many people in it,” he said. “That raises a red flag for us.”

Nicolaas Groeneveld-Meijer, who helps protect migrant agriculture and seafood workers from exploitation as a labor trafficking attorney with Pine Tree Legal Assistance’s Farmworker Unit, disputed Maddocks’ claim that more undocumented workers are coming to Maine. He said that rhetoric, along with the news release’s use of buzzwords like “smuggling scheme” and “stash house,” contributes to a culture of “hysterical xenophobia” around immigration.

Where migrant advocates and the Border Patrol agree is that the exploitation of undocumented workers, who are often vulnerable to intimidation by employers, continues to be a problem the government must address.

“The fact that they’re undocumented does not deprive them of the protections of the federal worker protection statutes, like the Fair Labor Standards Act,” said Michael Felsen, a former attorney with the U.S. Department of Labor who now works with worker centers and other groups that support immigrant laborers.

Like other advocates, Felsen was alarmed when he learned of the cramped quarters in the Lisbon home. He speculated that the workers’ employer, described by Border Patrol only as a “Massachusetts-based company” that rented the house, likely violated rules that govern minimum wage and overtime rates. It was as possible, he said, that the migrants were also victims of trafficking, essentially forced to live and work in Lisbon without their consent.

But the government’s decision not to release more information about the Lisbon men has sparked another fear in Felsen and Groeneveld-Meijer: that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is prioritizing deporting the workers over investigating the people who may have exploited them.

A NEW TACK

Since President Biden’s inauguration, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has announced major policy changes intended to shift the agency’s focus from deporting migrant workers to investigating potential workforce violations.

An October 2021 memo from DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas ended the Trump administration’s practice of mass worksite raids, which had “resulted in the simultaneous arrest of hundreds of workers and were used as a tool by exploitative employers to suppress and retaliate against workers’ assertion of labor laws.”

New DHS guidelines released this January created a streamlined process for workers who have been victims of exploitation to pursue “deferred action” status. That status provides the right to stay in the United States for up to two years, which allows workers to help participate in governmental investigations into “unscrupulous employers.”

This policy shift has won applause from advocates like Felsen, who pointed to the role undocumented workers play in correcting the nation’s widespread labor shortage.

“We have many million workers in this country who do hard, essential jobs that most U.S. citizens do not want to do,” he said. “This clearly is not an appropriate target for the Department of Homeland Security. They don’t have the resources to go after every undocumented worker – and, frankly, businesses would be crippled.”

Based on publicly available information, the Lisbon men seem like perfect candidates for deferred action status, Felsen said. But he and other advocates have not been able to confirm that the men will have a chance to stay in the country.

According to the Border Patrol’s initial news release on March 22, two men who previously had been deported could be subject to felony reentry charges. Four of the Lisbon workers already were awaiting removal proceedings from a prior encounter, while the remaining 11 migrants were newly placed in removal proceedings.

Maddocks said Border Patrol had turned the case over to ICE, which would be responsible for determining whether the men could qualify for deferred action status.

A DHS spokesperson initially said in an email that Border Patrol remained in control of the case before clarifying that ICE’s Homeland Security Investigation unit was aware of the case. She declined to provide information about whether the Lisbon workers are currently being detained, whether they are being considered for deferred action status, or whether ICE is investigating the company that employed the men.

Advocates’ attempts to learn more about the men and whether they’re still being detained have largely proved fruitless, said Groeneveld-Meijer, who has only been able to confirm that one man was being held in Rhode Island as of last week. The fact that the workers were immediately placed in deportation proceedings, combined with the lack of transparency from the government, has made him worried that Homeland Security’s new policies are being ignored in this case.

“What seems to have happened with these 17 workers is that they became the ones that were persecuted,” Groeneveld-Meijer said. “My fear is that some of these men may have legitimate claims against the employer and may be deported before they have a chance to vindicate their rights.”

LINGERING QUESTIONS

Property records link the vacant Lisbon house to a picturesque Kennebunk street that features a series of neat, grassy yards, half-a-dozen driveway basketball hoops and a cul-de-sac.

The house at 27 Ericas Way is home to “Elizabeth Jean Property Management, LLC,” which formed in May 2022 and purchased 93 Main St. in Lisbon on June 1, according to records from the Lisbon Town Office and the Maine Secretary of State’s website. It’s also the home of Anna Milley and her husband, Ron Milley, president and CEO of Consultant Services Commercial New England.

CSC New England, which specializes in pre-construction inspections, has played a role in several major development projects around the state, including the Wex building in Portland and the Lincoln Mill in Biddeford. In a May 2021 article in Mainebiz, Ron Milley credited the company’s success to his connections with developers.

Several attempts to reach CSC New England and the Milley household by phone went unanswered last week. When approached at her doorstep, Anna Milley said all she and her husband knew was that they had rented 93 Main St. to the owner of the business that employed the migrants. She then abruptly ended the interview and said her husband would call the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram later that day. Ron Milley never contacted the paper.

No government organization has released information on the Massachusetts business that employed the migrants or rented the Lisbon home where they stayed.

Advocates like Felson and Groeneveld-Meijer continue to seek information about the Lisbon group’s whereabouts and whether they’ve been given access to legal resources.

“I don’t know if they’re still in the United States,” Groeneveld-Meijer said. “They could already be in Texas, or they could already have been deported.”

A Spanish translation of this article appears here.

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