Agents questioned Marissa Carate on Main Street and at her apartment.
RANGELEY – U.S. Border Patrol supervisor Frank Blauvelt Jr. said Thursday that agents who questioned a Peruvian woman living in Norway were doing nothing unusual.
The two agents made contact with Marissa Carate on Main Street at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday and then showed up at her downtown apartment at 8 p.m. Carate said they made her nervous and their insistence that she was in the country illegally made her uncomfortable.
Blauvelt is the supervisory Border Patrol agent in Rangeley. He said the agents were in Bethel earlier during the day and then went to do intelligence gathering with Norway police and at the Oxford County Sheriff’s Office in Paris.
The two agents saw Carate on Main Street and began a general conversation and asked about the location of the Police Department.
“That’s how we encounter people,” Blauvelt said. “We stop and talk to them. We don’t just work at points of entry.”
He said the agents got Carate’s address from the Norway police.
The presence of the Border Patrol has doubled over the past two years.
Monte Bennett, assistant chief patrol agent in Houlton, said the number of agents at an office is classified information.
He said he was not surprised that Carate said she was unsure of who the Border Patrol was, because many foreign nationals flying into the United States never see an agent.
He said that the presence of agents in Oxford County is unpredictable. He called the service “intelligence driven” and responds where needed, when needed.
Carate said she began to feel uneasy after the agents did not know the color of one of her immigration documents. But Blauvelt said that countries often change the color of documents and agents have no way of telling when this occurs.
He also said that all Border Patrol agents are trained in speaking Spanish and will speak in Spanish if a person has trouble speaking English.
Carate said the agents apologized just before they left.
This surprised Blauvelt.
“I’m unsure why they would apologize for doing their job,” he said.
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