Patrisha McLean is the CEO and founder of Finding Our Voices, a grassroots nonprofit.

Let’s talk about “the worst of the worst.” 

That is who the Trump administration claims to be targeting in Maine, with a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson saying, “We are no longer allowing criminal illegal aliens to terrorize American citizens.” The crimes the DHS spokesperson announced that were committed by Maine immigrants? Aggravated assault, false imprisonment and endangering the welfare of children. 

As it turns out, many of the immigrants arrested by federal officials by ICE have no criminal record at all.

Meanwhile, U.S. citizens are terrorizing Maine women and children every minute of the day. Domestic abuse — not illegal immigration — is the true threat to public safety in our state, crying out for someone, anyone, everyone to finally do something about it.

In January, the Maine Department of Public Safety reported that violent crime continues a downward trend with the exception of domestic violence.

In the last year studied, 2024, the home was deemed the most dangerous place to be, with domestic violence accounting for half the kidnappings and abductions, and also aggravated assaults, which often involve strangulation. Intimate partners were reported to have perpetrated four times more sex crimes than strangers.

And once again (retiring department spokesperson Steve McCausland in 2021 called it “frustrating as hell” that domestic violence statistics hadn’t budged in his three decades in office) domestic abuse is at the root of about half of all homicides in Maine.

A week before ICE spread from Minnesota to Maine, a man named Dane Burke from Skowhegan was terrorizing residents of two states by leading police on a high-speed car chase as the suspect in the death of his former girlfriend Nichole Jackson. Burke has since been charged with her murder.

Jackson was a 46-year-old mother of two and — like Alex Pretti, who was shot dead by federal agents in Minnesota while trying to protect a woman an agent had shoved to the ground — a nurse. 

The thuggery we are all seeing now in our streets in broad daylight by federal agents echoes what women experience all the time behind closed doors from their intimate partners, including shoving, ugly, misogynistic put-downs and destruction of cellphones. Also, the swagger that comes from knowing the system is going to protect them. 

In a video documenting public rallies against domestic violence last year in Lewiston and Brunswick, community college honors student Noel Richardson talks about her ex punching her in the face while she was holding their baby. The consequences? Forty-eight hours in jail. 

On the day the federal government announced “Operation Catch of the Day” in Maine, Shawn Samuels, who, like Burke, is a homegrown U.S. citizen, was charged by state officials with killing his 3-month-old baby. 

When Samuels allegedly beat his daughter to death, he was out on bail from allegedly strangling his intimate partner last year.  His criminal record reportedly reveals that, before that, he allegedly strangled another partner “10 to 15 times … to the point that she thought he would kill her.” 

Strangulation, reported the Maine Domestic Abuse Homicide Panel in 2022, “is a significant risk factor for future lethal violence and must be treated with the seriousness it warrants.”

Yet Samuels was allowed to bail out of custody after being criminally charged with the strangulation of a partner, and with a history of strangling intimate partners.

How was the death of his daughter Lyla, found with four broken ribs, not wholly preventable? Why shouldn’t someone or some system have to answer for giving such an obviously dangerous person the freedom of access to a baby, and the baby’s mother?

Why is Rep. Lucas Lanigan, R-Sanford, in his second year as a Maine lawmaker while under an indictment for strangling his wife?

And when are Maine state officials, as well as the federal government, going to treat domestic violence with the seriousness it warrants?