It’s hard to open up a social media platform, these days, without running into evidence of what’s been going on in and around Maine.

Scroll through state and local pages and you will see people trying to tip one another off about the fast and dirty work, now watched for all over our state, of the Trump administration’s still-swaggering Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Suspect vehicles stationed at named highway exits and intersections. Grainy photos of “plain clothes dudes with FBI patches.” Agents said to be lingering at gas stations and toll plazas. Beneath those posts, anxious anecdotes and other warnings. Here and there, to be sure, some messages of unreserved support. Some indignation at the mere spirit of snitching, some “let them do their job.”

Can we dismiss this blend of citizen journalism as online hysteria? As scaremongering by tipsters of all stripes? Leave the unverified sprawl of the world wide web behind, if you prefer, and consider the local news.

In Calais, a June 13 Bangor Daily News headline tells us, “A ‘concerned’ Mainer’s tip got an immigrant wrongly detained for 65 days.”

In Cumberland County last week, a group named No ICE for ME presented county officials with a petition calling for the county to end its agreement with the U.S. Marshals Service to hold immigrant detainees at its jail. Almost 3,000 people had signed it.

“A large majority of people from Cumberland County are opposed to ICE rampaging through our immigrant communities,” said Todd Chretien, a co-organizer of No ICE for ME. “Our job now is to convince the majority of people in the county of what they can do locally to break this connection with ICE.”

Outside Portland in May, at the same style of pop-up traffic stop doing the rounds on social media, Searsport resident Lucas Segóbia was, to use ICE parlance that is unsettling in its nonchalance, “picked up.”

For successive days, his fiancé had no idea where he was. After being shuttled between prisons and a Border Patrol site in Aroostook County, she discovered that he had been flown to an immigration detention center in Texas.

According to Anna Welch, a professor and director of the University of Maine School of Law’s Refugee and Human Rights Clinic, Maine-based immigrants have been arrested and sent to jails and ICE processing and staging centers all across the country.

“We’ve talked to folks who were woken up in the middle of the night to find they were being rounded up and not knowing where they’re being taken to,” she told the Press Herald.

National reporting tells the same story. Immigration rights advocates say that, far from being violent criminals, 2025’s detainees often have valid work permits, are actively engaged in lawful residency and citizenship processes and do not have criminal records.

“Why” is not a question that’s getting answered by this agency.

And so it was in the case of 32-year-old Gratien Milandou-Wamba, a Congolese man arrested in April while driving to work as a corrections officer in Cumberland (a job he has since been fired from) from his home in Falmouth. ICE would not respond to questions last week about why Milandou-Wamba, whose application for asylum is pending, is being detained at a jail in New Hampshire. His own questions have also gone unanswered; he is still in jail.

The quotas, the targets and the role of ICE, in its current presentation and operation, has been too loosely defined for any of us to credibly declare it to be doing its job.

Less than a month ago, this editorial board commended the town of Wells’ police department for suspending its formal partnership with the agency.

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

It’s still not that agency. Our commendation of Wells must be read as a commendation to the people of Wells — and to all the people of Maine noticing things, asking questions and continuing to raise the alarm — for whom an ongoing “policy” of arrest, detention and deportation without any information, accountability or expectation of due process is simply unacceptable. Who among us still needs convincing?