The image above shows 4 weeks of Hotline data during and after the January surge. "Previous period" refers to the prior 4-weeks.

You’re receiving this newsletter because you've either been volunteering, signed up to get trained, or you’ve been supporting the Hotline in other ways.

We were hoping to get this second newsletter out to you earlier this month, but as you may have noticed, we’ve had some significant transitions. For one, we’ve been “de-googling” our data, which means a higher level of protection for personal information.

We’ve also begun a massive undertaking of creating an interactive map which will present Hotline data integrated with mutual aid resources, allowing faster and more effective communication about the activity of federal enforcement agencies and the nearest available resources to assist those who are impacted.

We hope to roll that out in the coming months. But for now, we’re still relying on static maps like the one above and this one below from the past two weeks.

Calls keep coming in

Many of you volunteering as operators and verifiers know first hand that Hotline reports are still coming in. While calls in February and March have been lower than January, they have remained consistent at several hundred calls a week.

Since publishing our first Switchboard newsletter last month, we’ve received over 3,128 calls and 222 texts — 69 with photos. Several dozen calls came from people looking to speak with French, Spanish and Portuguese operators.

In addition to the calls we answered, operators made almost 923 outgoing calls responding to texts and voicemails.

Inbound (grey) and outbound (blue) calls from February 6 to March 22

As a result, we logged more than 300 calls with roughly 230 being possible sightings of federal agencies and 70 being referral calls connecting people to mutual aid funds and service providers. Of those, 24 were specifically for detainee support.  

Among these were dozens of confirmed abductions, more than 30 of which occurred in multiple work site raids between Backyard Farms — check out this article for an in-depth report on the Backyard Farms — and at least one wind turbine construction site in Wilton, which didn’t make headlines.

All this despite Senator Collins’ announcement of supposedly striking a deal with DHS back in January.

There’s an operator training session this evening as well as April 13, both 5:30 - 7pm.

Please sign up! Some of our volunteer operators have become unavailable in recent weeks, so we are looking for new operators to join us. If you have already completed your training and homework, please sign up for a shift ASAP.

Verifier trainings still take place on the first Tuesday of the month, 5 - 7pm, and we are still seeking to grow this network. If you are not yet trained and would like to be, please sign up and share with friends and family as well.

We're also offering a new training on April 6th at 5pm for verifiers who want to support with mapping/canvassing in their areas of at-risk workplaces, to help support awareness and defense of 4th Amendment protections. Sign up for that here.

Note: Our trainings were on hold briefly because of white supremacist groups encouraging their followers to sign up in bad faith to disrupt our efforts. But we’ve created a process to vet interested volunteers in order to re-opened registration. 

So far we've blocked the numbers of 1,242 bad faith callers, and we retain a database of these numbers, their voicemails and their text messages, in the case that we need to document harassment and/or threats of violence against us.

Our Hotline doesn't just monitor activity of ICE and CBP, we also provide referrals to mutual aid funds and service providers, as this charts shows from the past two weeks.

Hotline background

There are over 1,500 volunteers in the Maine Immigrant Defense Hotline universe. This newsletter was created to provide updates, data and trends we’re seeing in the world of ICE watching and immigrant defense resource referral.

First, thank you to all who have stepped up! Because of your dedication, we've been able to provide the most accurate and reliable information available in this time of fear and confusion created by DHS’s “enhanced immigration enforcement” in Maine and nationally.

Calls to our Hotline have remained lower than they were during the January surge, no doubt thanks to our organized response. But we know ICE and CBP are still here, still racially profiling, still disregarding due process, still separating families and harming communities.

We also now know, with disturbing evidence, that some local law enforcement agencies are coordinating with DHS agency officers who continue to abduct people, leaving children without their parents and households without breadwinners.

We continue to live with the looming threat of 1000+ arrests from ICE’s deeply flawed “worst of the worst” list that was declared in January, if only at a slower pace — for now.

And as the DHS shutdown continues, we're disturbed to learn that ICE agents will be replacing TSA staff at airports in coming days.

Stay active

If you haven’t told your congressional representatives that you want major reforms from ICE and CBP before further funding is provided to DHS, use this link to send an email and make a call today, and then pass it on.

Your donations and volunteer hours are keeping this Hotline running. If you can’t make an operator shift or respond to a call for a verifier, you can make a donation to keep us on the lines.

Thank you for the ongoing dedication and support.

Mufalo Chitam

MIRC Executive Director

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