After her spouse recorded federal immigration officers in South Portland this year, Carlyn Williams said she later received a call from someone claiming to represent the Department of Homeland Security.

The caller told Williams to encourage her spouse, Polyxenia Pantos, “not to do anything like that in the future because people who are doing things like that might get added to a domestic terrorism watchlist,” according to court records filed in U.S. District Court on Tuesday. Williams believes she was contacted because Pantos had been driving her car.

Williams and Pantos have joined a federal lawsuit against DHS, alleging that agents violated the rights of Mainers who watched and filmed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity during a January operation.

The lawsuit was first filed in February by Elinor Hilton and Colleen Fagan, two Maine residents who said they had taken videos of masked agents. According to the lawsuit, agents told the women they would be put into a database.

The plaintiffs, represented by lawyers from Protect Democracy, have argued that DHS agents illegally collected their data and threatened to add them to a database, while they engaged in activity protected by the First Amendment.

In court, DHS has denied operating any such database. A spokesperson for DHS said in a statement Tuesday that there “is NO database of ‘domestic terrorists’ run by DHS” but that the agency investigates and refers “all threats, assaults and obstruction” to “the appropriate law enforcement.”

A federal judge denied the plaintiffs’ request for a temporary restraining order against DHS in March, ruling that he didn’t have enough evidence to merit such an emergency measure.

Lawyers filed the amended complaint on Tuesday.

According to the lawsuit, two months after the call, Williams and Pantos were coming back to the United States on March 16 from a trip to Quebec City when a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent detained them for an hour and requested registration information for Williams’ vehicle, even though they were traveling in Pantos’ car.

“The experience indicates that Plaintiffs Pantos and Williams have indeed been placed on a government list or database of some kind, as the DHS caller threatened,” the couple’s attorneys wrote in court records.

During a hearing that same morning in the case, which the couple was not involved in at the time, a lawyer for DHS told U.S. District Judge John Woodcock that there was no database.

The hearing had been focused on the original plaintiffs’ request for a temporary restraining order. At that time, DHS attorneys said the agency had been following a policy in place since 2019 that prohibits federal agents from “profiling, targeting or discriminating against any individual for exercising his or her First Amendment rights.”

The plaintiffs’ attorneys questioned during that hearing whether the policy was being followed. According to the updated complaint, the policy was listed as “archived” on the DHS website until March 13.

The plaintiffs are expected to file a request for preliminary injunction to prevent what they have alleged is the unconstitutional collection of data by DHS from Mainers exercising their First Amendment rights. They are also seeking class action status.

The lawsuit also details additional allegations involving three people who are not named as plaintiffs.

According to the complaint, a woman began following an agent “from a safe distance,” then realized the officer was leading her to her residence, “where he then began ‘honking aggressively.'”

Another woman, the complaint states, said multiple agents came to her house after she observed their operations outside of a local school. In a video of the encounter, according to the complaint, agents tell the woman “this is a warning,” “we know you live here,” and that she was “impeding an operation.”

“Like the threat to put observers in a government database or watchlist and to label them ‘domestic terrorists,’ driving by or otherwise appearing at observers’ homes is intended to punish and deter the exercise of First Amendment activity,” the complaint states. “The message is clear: Defendants are tracking those who observe or record them and will retaliate against those that they are able to identify.”