AUBURN – Police captured two men believed to be in the country illegally Tuesday but only after a school was locked down and government officials took to the air in a helicopter.

The drama began at about 12:30 p.m. when a pair of men bolted from Maine State Police after a traffic stop on an overpass near the Auburn turnpike exit on Washington Street.

Police said the men were driving without licenses and that a check of their identification suggested they were illegal aliens from Honduras.

State police were preparing to have the car towed and the men taken into custody when the suspects fled on foot and disappeared along railroad tracks into the woods.

Reaction was swift. Auburn police sent several officers to the area and they began a search on the ground. State police, who had already contacted the Immigration and Naturalization Service, called for a helicopter from Brunswick Naval Air Station.

Police contacted the Spurwink School on Old Danville Corner Road and advised them to lock their doors while the fugitives remained on the loose.

“The men were running in that area and so we had the school locked down,” Auburn police Sgt. James Robicheau said. “It was a precaution.”

INS agents flew over the area searching for the runaway suspects while state police got a tracking dog to the scene. Gunshots were heard in the area at the time of the pursuit, but Robicheau said those came from hunters in a different area of woods and that they were not related to the search.

No one was hurt.

Robicheau said his officers had the suspects contained to an area between a swamp and the river as the search progressed. The suspects were ultimately tracked to a wooded area off Beech Hill Road.

“They didn’t get very far,” Robicheau said. “One of the dogs picked up the scent as the suspects were coming out of the woods.”

The Honduran men were captured at about 1:30 p.m. and taken into federal custody. Their names were not available Tuesday night. It was believed they were taken to a federal holding unit at the Cumberland County Jail in Portland.

Robicheau said the men never tried to enter Spurwink, which in Auburn provides day treatment for kids with mental illnesses. Police did not know how many children and staffers were inside when the school was locked down.

When the suspects were first stopped by police, they presented paperwork showing that they were citizens, according to State Police spokesman Stephen McCausland.

“However, it appeared that those passports had been doctored,” McCausland said.

The case against the two suspects was being handled later Tuesday by the INS.