Domingo Tot Quip was waiting at a Portland bus stop with a co-worker on a frigid day in January when an unmarked car pulled up. Federal immigration agents stepped out. Tot Quip and his co-worker were arrested.

About a week later, the 31-year-old Portland resident was loaded onto a plane and deported to Guatemala.

There were two problems: First, although Tot Quip is from Guatemala, he didn’t have a deportation order. Second, the day before the flight a federal judge ordered ICE not to remove him from the country.

Agency representatives admitted in court filings months after the arrest that they “inadvertently removed” him because they had mistaken him for someone else from Guatemala with the same first name and birthday.

“ICE understands the gravity of the inadvertent removal and is working diligently to rectify this error,” Brian Sullivan, assistant director of ICE’s Boston field office, wrote in an April court filing.

Tot Quip’s arrest and erroneous deportation highlight many of the concerns raised about the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown. Dozens of others across the country have been wrongfully deported over the last year as enforcement has ramped up in an effort increase the number of removals.

Tot Quip was arrested in the early hours of what ICE dubbed “Operation Catch of the Day,” an intensified immigration enforcement action across Maine that the agency said resulted in more than 200 people being detained. It was one in a series of large-scale immigration operations that have unfolded in New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and elsewhere.

ICE said it had identified more than 1,400 “targets” in Maine, which it said included the “worst of the worst” criminals. But the vast majority of people arrested here did not have criminal histories — including Tot Quip, according to his attorney, Kerry Doyle.

“He had his documents on him, with his true name and date of birth and everything. He would have no record because he’d never had any interactions with ICE previously,” Doyle said. “I literally don’t know how they managed to deport him as somebody else.”

Following his arrest, Tot Quip was processed at Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Boston field office before being transported to a deportation staging facility in Louisiana.

Now, some six months later, Tot Quip is set to return to the U.S. next week, Doyle said. The return flight will be at the government’s expense.

It’s unclear when exactly Tot Quip entered the U.S. or if he may have been seeking asylum. He could not be reached for this story. English is his third language and Spanish is his second. He primarily speaks an indigenous Guatemalan language, Doyle said.

Doyle has more than two decades of experience in immigration law, including a stint as an immigration judge and as ICE’s principal legal adviser prior to President Donald Trump’s second term, providing guidance to the agency’s leaders and agents.

She’s seen arrests like Tot Quip’s, made suddenly, mistakenly and without any explanation, become more and more common over the last two years.

“People in Maine’s Latin American community are terrified right now,” Doyle said. “They see that you’re brown and they just arrest you. They don’t ask questions, they don’t look at your documents, they don’t care. They just take you.”

She attributed ICE’s errors to arrest quotas the agency has reportedly set for itself. While ICE officials have repeatedly denied claims that the agency sets target numbers for arrests, Trump adviser Stephen Miller has publicly stated the administration aims to make “a minimum of 3,000 arrests” every day.

Doyle said an emphasis on arrest numbers and increasingly aggressive tactics leaves more room for ICE agents to make mistakes in their course of duty.

“On one end of the mistakes, we see people getting shot,” she added, referring to Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero’s death in Biddeford at the hands of an ICE agent. “On the other, we see them deporting someone wrongly.”

Neither ICE spokespeople nor officials who have written court files relating to Tot Quip’s case responded to requests for comment on his deportation.

Sullivan, the assistant director of ICE’s Boston field office, has previously been admonished by a federal judge for repeatedly making “false and misleading” statements about immigration cases. In one instance, he misled the court about an Ecuadorian woman who was unlawfully held in ICE custody and denied medical treatment, according to the Bangor Daily News.

Judges across the country have made hundreds of similar condemnations against ICE officials and attorneys. In some cases, ICE has been found shuffling detainees around various facilities to subvert court orders. In others, they have flat out ignored a judge’s demands, Politico reported.

“There has been an undeniable move by the government in the past month to defy court orders or at least to stretch the legal process to the breaking point in an attempt to deny noncitizens their due process rights,” Michael Davis, a federal judge in Minnesota, wrote in a January court order.

The agency has previously claimed “soft-on-crime politicians” and “activist judges” have been obstructing its mass deportation efforts.

In an April court filing, assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Sauter wrote ICE had received a court order “prohibiting (Tot Quip’s) transfer or removal from the United States” on Jan. 27, six days after he was arrested and one day before he was ultimately deported.

Sauter attributed the deportation to ICE agents’ misidentifying Tot Quip during his arrest. When Doyle filed a habeas petition days after the arrest, asking the government to prove it was holding Tot Quip lawfully, the name on the petition did not match the name ICE had processed him under.

“ICE was unable to identify” Tot Quip as a result, Sauter wrote.

Dozens of others have been removed from the U.S. despite judges’ orders, a Portland Press Herald review of news reports from across the country found, including some American citizens.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported last year to a notorious El Salvadoran prison due to an “administrative error” on ICE’s part. In November, ICE violated a court order by deporting a Massachusetts college student to Honduras. In March, ICE erroneously deported two 12-year-old girls, both U.S. citizens, to Guatemala.

In at least some of those cases, ICE has facilitated people’s return to the country. Sullivan wrote in an April court filing that he started the process of bringing Tot Quip back to Maine “immediately upon discovering this inadvertent removal.”

But Doyle said her client, like many immigrants, is fearful of what may happen when he gets back.

Though the U.S. government will expedite his parole application to allow legal reentry, there is a real possibility that ICE will seek to deport him again as soon as he returns, she said.