The Department of Homeland Security sent 159 agents to Maine during the January immigration enforcement surge, according to records filed in a lawsuit alleging that agents violated the constitutional rights of people who were filming them.
One record includes a list of agents and the regions they were sent from, including New England, California, Utah, New York, Maryland, Illinois, Louisiana, Washington, D.C., New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The agents’ names are blacked out in a version of the federal court record publicly available online.
The government also uploaded partial depositions of three federal agents, including a Homeland Security Investigations officer who was assigned to work in Maine during the surge. According to court records, the agent’s team was involved in interactions with three observers who were told — on camera — that they were being added to a watchlist.
That agent testified that he believed the surge ended earlier than scheduled because of the cold weather.
While the agents’ names are largely redacted in the deposition documents, they appear to be included as the file names when downloaded from the federal court’s electronic records system. Wyn Hornbuckle, a Department of Justice spokesperson, confirmed on Friday that this was an error.
A spokesperson for DHS did not respond to requests for comment Friday.
The lawsuit was filed in February by two Maine residents who allege agents working for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement violated the rights of several people who observed and recorded their activity. The lawsuit was amended in April to add two more plaintiffs, who said they were detained at the border for an hour in March, two months after an ICE agent said he was placing one of them in a database.
The government has denied the allegations, including the existence of a database of observers.
On Sept. 18, the government filed a motion to dismiss the case, attaching several exhibits to support its arguments. The motion was filed on the same day that a federal judge in Minnesota dismissed a lawsuit that protesters filed earlier this year, also alleging First Amendment violations.
The plaintiffs are still working on a response to the government’s motion, but their attorney, JoAnna Suriani, said arguments supporting their allegations are included in a motion for a preliminary injunction filed on Sept. 11.
That motion — and all of the accompanying exhibits — has been sealed at the government’s request, in a motion that also was sealed as of Friday when the courthouse closed at 4:30 p.m.
Redefining First Amendment rights?
“If the government gets what it wants in its motion to dismiss, their definition of what it means for a protester to ‘interfere’ is going to completely swallow the First Amendment right that everyday Americans have,” Suriani said.
In the lawsuit, the four observers say they recorded videos of agents conducting arrests and transporting detainees. While they were recording, they allege masked agents took the observers’ biometric information and said they were adding them to a database. In one case, the lawsuit alleges, someone claiming to be from DHS called an observer’s spouse and told them that they should “not to do anything like that in the future because people who are doing things like that might get added to a domestic terrorism watchlist.”
The government’s attorneys argued in the motion to dismiss that the agents behaved appropriately in responding to what they perceived as threats from observers to interfere with immigration arrests.
The agency argued that its policy prohibits agents from recording observers, but that agents have “legitimate reasons to identify individuals or vehicles encountered during enforcement activity, assess whether they present safety or operational concerns, and to obtain address information in connection with those functions.”
One agent who was deposed testified that he feared that observers meant to “dox” him and other agents, and that he believed they were trying to stop an arrest.
The agent’s comments were included in an exhibit filed by the government titled “Coleman, Jhon, 08-13-2026.” The agent is referred to by his initials in other court records, and he is referred to as “Mr. Coleman” at one point in the portion of his deposition filed as an exhibit by the government.
In its motion to dismiss, the government said that agent “J.C.” of Homeland Security Investigations in Boston was involved in three of the four interactions with the plaintiffs in the case. The government argued that there were only a limited number of agents who were briefly in Maine from other states and mentioned a database to observers.
“While I was in Maine, from multiple different locations, I heard multiple times that people were going to find me and my family, and we’re going to pay for it,” Coleman said in the deposition. “I heard many threats, and I heard tons of profanity towards us.”
Suriani — who declined to discuss the agents’ names — said her clients “vigorously deny” allegations that they were interfering with arrests. She said the government’s exhibits offer a “very small sampling of the deposition testimony,” and that the plaintiffs look forward to their filings becoming public.
‘A nice little database’
In another deposition record that lists “Reddish, Officer Jordan 08-11-2026” in the file name, an agent testified that he normally works in Utah. The agent’s name is redacted at the top of the deposition. He is referred to at one point in the document as Officer Reddish.
According to his deposition, and the government’s motion to dismiss, that agent spoke with another officer who was filmed telling a woman in South Portland on Jan. 23 that the agency has “a nice little database.” That video was shared widely on social media during the January surge.
“I believe I was just trying to tell him to watch what he says,” the agent testified, according to the deposition. “He explained to me that he was trying to be funny. The joke didn’t land clearly. And I said just watch what you say.”
A reporter emailed all three men from the government’s deposition documents and received no response. Other attempts to reach them by phone and social media were not successful.