Last Tuesday, the town of Wells decided to press pause on a formal agreement by its police department to work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

Until that happened, the Wells Police Department was the only law enforcement agency in Maine to have brokered such an arrangement. Under existing terms and conditions, we hope it will be the last.

The development last week is a welcome one for several reasons.

It puts Maine at a temporary remove from the potential ills of an ICE program referred to under the heading 287(g), which is designed to “delegate to state and local law enforcement officers the authority to perform specified immigration officer functions under the agency’s direction and oversight.”

It exhibits a certain respect for state lawmakers’ work at the local level — two legislative bills that would rule out such partnerships with ICE have been proposed in Augusta.

And it pays heed, too, to the disappointment and alarm expressed by Wells residents and voters in response to the agreement. “It’s not just ‘divisive,’” Wells resident Janet Campagna wrote in a recent letter to the editor in these pages.

“This agreement actively erodes the trust between our local law enforcement and immigrant communities. When officers become immigration enforcers, cooperation diminishes, making all residents less safe as victims and witnesses fear reporting crimes.”

Maine witnessed a similar outcome last month in the case of both the Monmouth and Winthrop police departments, both of which withdrew their applications to 287(g) in response to considerable public outcry. Arguments against participation are often administrative as much as they are social or emotional; at the town hall meeting in Monmouth, Dori Burnham, a local who worked in immigration and customs for years, thanked the department heads.

“If you withdrew the application, I salute you,” Burnham said “It is such a difficult thing to navigate. I went through 18 weeks of immigration training and there were still laws we didn’t know. That was 25 years ago, and now it’s seemingly impossible.”

The 287(g) program didn’t start with President Trump, whose executive order earlier this year revived and expanded an almost 30-year-old provision.

A local partner can opt in for one or all of its three models: the “jail services model” permits officers to screen people in jail for immigration violations; the “warrant service officer” model authorizes officers to comply with ICE warrants or requests on immigrants at jails; and the “task force model,” which is the most common, and was up for consideration in Monmouth and entered into in Wells, permits officers to investigate a person’s immigration status in the course of their day-to-day duties.

The option — recall that it is just that, an option — has been popular. Every county in Florida, for instance, has signed on.

According to the Associated Press, ICE had 135 agreements with local and state law enforcement agencies in 21 states last December. By last Monday, that number had risen to 588 agreements across 40 states, with applications in from a further 83 agencies.

The upside for ICE, here, is crystal clear.

The potential benefit to our local authorities is murky, at best, and best avoided as a result.

To expand the reach of a well-defined and responsibly managed federal agency through structured cooperation would be one thing. ICE as emboldened under the second Trump administration, however, is just not that agency.

Since the president took office, we have been faced with ample evidence of its general air of lawlessness, its galling absence of standards in seemingly blind pursuit of deportations and its profound disrespect for due process.

The mistakes made by this jumped-up agency rise well above your average clerical error: homes have been wrongly raided, people wrongly detained and, to this day, 30-year-old Kilmar Ábrego Garcia remains locked up in a maximum-security mega prison in El Salvador.

Furthermore, the average local law enforcement agency is strapped for resources and funds. The impossibility of freeing up an officer for a period of training — to carry out the mandate of another agency — has even led to some of those training requirements being reduced, which should provoke even more cynicism (if not derision).

Six states already have laws or policies against 287(g) agreements. There’s no reason Maine should not join them. It’s good that our lawmakers, with the public’s support, are taking steps to do so.