When Lograi Tuzolana, an Angolan asylum seeker residing in Lewiston, walked into an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Scarborough for a routine check-in last week, she did not expect to leave in chains for an out-of-state immigration detention facility. 

Tuzolana, 37, was arrested and detained by ICE agents Jan. 21 at a scheduled check-in at a Scarborough ICE office as part of her asylum-seeking process. She has been seeking asylum status since 2022 when she fled Angola after experiencing extreme mental and physical trauma that left lasting injuries.

After showing agents her driver’s license and being told twice that her background check came back clean, an agent emerged and told her they were arresting her. The reason they gave, Tuzolana said, was because she failed to provide a photo check-in back in 2023.

“That’s when they put chains on me, chains on my feet, chains on my hands and my stomach,” Tuzolana said through an interpreter about her ICE arrest.

“In my home country, the chains that they put on my stomach left a scar. The wound it gave me, the one that made me flee from my country to come to this place — when they put that chain on my wound (during the ICE arrest), it put me into a crisis.”

ICE agents arrested 206 people in Maine between Jan. 20 to 24, according to a news release issued by the agency Thursday.

The enhanced enforcement operation “targeted egregious criminal alien offenders,” the release stated, though the agency stopped short of saying everyone arrested had criminal records.

Local and state officials and families said some people with misdemeanors or no criminal records were apprehended during the operation, including asylum seekers, a Lewiston mother, an 18-year-old student, a civil engineer and two corrections officers, as well as a local man married to a citizen.

According to court documents, the stated reason for Tuzolana’s detainment was that she failed to submit a photo of herself during a routine check-in in 2023 as required by the program she was in that provides alternatives to detention. Tuzolana has reported for ICE check-ins every two months since her arrival in September 2022 and she has no criminal history, according to the documents.

Tuzolana said the lapse that day stemmed from a dying battery in a cellphone supplied by the U.S. government when she first arrived in the country. In all previous and subsequent photo check-ins, she always supplied a photo of herself, she said.

“It was not my fault, but they arrested me,” she said. 

Tuzolana said she was held into the evening at the Scarborough facility — after being allowed phone calls to her pastor and husband — and then put into a van with several other people and transferred to a facility in Burlington, Massachusetts. 

“They put me in a little room with 50 women,” Tuzolana said, adding that showers were not allowed and that there was only one toilet for all to share. “Everyone was feeling bad, sick. Many people could not breathe properly, people were falling down because of the conditions. The food was like dog food.”

An attorney for Tuzolana immediately filed a habeas corpus petition arguing that her detention violated her Fifth Amendment right to due process. The petition asserted Tuzolana has a right to remain in the United States while her asylum case plays out, and argued that her detainment unfolded without adequate procedural protections. 

U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin agreed in a Jan. 23 order, granting Tuzolana’s petition and ordering her immediate release.

The judge allowed the federal government to pursue a bond hearing before Jan. 31, but barred federal agents from retaliating against Tuzolana for filing the petition or detaining her under the provisions of law governing arriving noncitizens. The federal government must report the status of any bond proceedings by Feb. 4.

Sorokin cited prior rulings in his decision, including the government’s concession that the case mirrored earlier detentions found to be unlawful, and the lack of an appropriate immigration detention facility for women in Massachusetts.

The federal government did not seek the bond hearing, Tuzolana said, adding that her final asylum appointment will be in the coming year.

Her attorney did not return a call for further information.

As events unfolded after her arrest, Tuzolana said she experienced a return to the trauma of her past life in her home country. She said Indifference seemed to be the general attitude from guards while others talked down to her and swore at her in a way she said she’s never experienced.

“(Now) I have difficulty sleeping, I have a headache all the time and a stomach ache, and I can’t go to work … They did not give me back my (driver’s) license,” she said.

As a result, since her Jan. 23 release, she has not felt comfortable leaving the house, she said. 

“I don’t feel safe at all, and that is why I’m not living my life like I used to before,” she said. “They arrested me unjustly and the treatment was very bad. When I came from my country, I came already traumatized, and in this country I just experienced the trauma again.”