More than two weeks after Border Patrol agents found 17 undocumented workers in a four-bedroom home, the men have disappeared into a process that lacks transparency. Some fear the government may be prioritizing deportation over investigations of possible exploitation.
LOCAL & STATE Posted 4:00 AMINCREASE FONT SIZEMystery around Lisbon migrants worries advocates
More than two weeks after Border Patrol agents found 17 undocumented workers in a four-bedroom home, the men have disappeared into a process that lacks transparency. Some fear the government may be prioritizing deportation over investigations of possible exploitation.
The house at 93 Main St., Lisbon, where 17 undocumented workers were found and detained. Ben McCanna/Staff PhotographerUp 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.