Alex was on a video call with her husband as he was driving Tuesday when police sirens started going off in the background. Marcos Da Silva pulled his truck over and rolled down the back window.

Three officers in tactical gear, their faces covered, said they were looking for someone with a warrant out for their arrest. Da Silva, 32, told them it wasn’t him.

He asked if they were ICE, but the officers didn’t respond. Instead, they asked Da Silva to step out of the vehicle and put him in handcuffs.

Then the video went dark.

Alex didn’t know what had happened until she saw a bystander video on Facebook of his gray Ford F-150 pulled over beneath the Interstate 295 overpass on Franklin Street in Portland.

“I just keep playing it over and over in my head,” said the woman, who asked to not be fully identified because of personal domestic violence history that predates her relationship with Da Silva.

Alex said her husband, originally from Brazil, is a contractor. He had driven into Portland that morning to pick up a day laborer from a shelter, and Alex said agents trailed him from there. It’s unclear if the other passenger was also detained.

Da Silva is now in ICE custody, according to an agency database, one of dozens who have been swept up by federal agents in Maine this week in an operation the Department of Homeland Security is calling “Catch of the Day.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to questions about why Da Silva was detained.

Federal officials have said that this week’s enforcement operation in Maine is targeting criminals, or “the worst of the worst.” Alex doesn’t understand how her husband fits into that category. He has no criminal history and a background check through the Maine State Bureau of Identification returned no records.

Alex, a U.S. citizen, said Da Silva entered the country as an asylum seeker, and in 2024 she filed a petition to sponsor him for a green card. Their application is still being processed, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

In the hours and days after her husband was detained, Alex called multiple local jails and tried to contact ICE directly looking for him. She attempted to get in touch with the person who had posted the video of the situation online to get more information, but couldn’t reach them.

Eventually, she found Da Silva in the agency’s online locator, and on Wednesday afternoon, she was able to contact her husband at a correctional facility in Plymouth, Massachusetts, that holds ICE detainees. He told her that his bond had been set at $5,000, and he needed an additional $5,000 to file a form, which she doesn’t have. He has a first court date in early February.

“My husband is worth way more than $10,000,” she said. “But I don’t have it.”

Alex said she contacted the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project for help, but they couldn’t assist because Da Silva had already been transferred out of state. That organization was only providing free legal help to people detained in Maine or Maine residents detained at a facility in New Hampshire, although Policy Director Lisa Parisio said Friday that the organization is now providing legal assistance to those detained in Maine who have been moved out of state.

She spent two days calling state and local police and five area towing companies in search of her husband’s vehicle. On Thursday morning, Alex said she was finally able to find Da Silva’s truck after telling police she planned to file a stolen vehicle report. It will cost her $300 to get it out of a lot.

Alex said her husband is generous with his time, and a strong role model to her two teenage sons. They had been planning to drive to Bangor to pick up a meal for her birthday, which was this week.

“‘If you come across any money, you make sure you take care of the kids, and you get the groceries,”‘ Alex said Da Silva told her when they spoke on the phone Wednesday afternoon, even though he needed money for bond. “So even in this situation, he is 100% trying to think of others.”

She believes if what is happening in Maine right now were going on in other countries people would view it as an actionable offense.

“America would be outraged, and now we have turned into that. We have turned into our own terrorists, people that we would fight if that happened to anybody in America or even in another country,” she said. “And I just don’t understand where the morality has gone.”

Editor’s note : This story has been updated to reflect ILAP’s policy for assisting people who have been detained and moved out of state.