The US state known for lobster, beautiful coastlines and being the home of elites like actors and former presidents has become a hotbed for illegal immigrant crossings under President Donald Trump. The most migrants sneaking into the US through Maine in 24 years was recorded last month, the US Border Patrol revealed.

While The Pine Tree State usually saw between 25 and 50 encounters a month during the presidency of former President Joe Biden, the Border Patrol’s Houlton Sector arrested 113 people in April. It shows that migrants desperately trying to make it to the United States are choosing to enter through Canada, bypassing the intense layers of security at the Mexican border 2,000 miles away – where crossings have declined under President Donald Trump.

On the northern frontier, manpower pales in comparison to the US-Mexico international boundary. The migrants that illegally entered through Maine are from 16 different countries, with 42 migrants from Ecuador, 15 from Guatemala and 12 from Mexico among the three highest. Another six were from Venezuela, the country that largely fueled the border crisis during the Biden years on the southern border.

In March, a Venezuelan man accused of belonging to the brutal gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) was arrested for theft and turned over the Border Patrol. The Daily Mail was the first news organization in America to break the news about TdA coming to the US. In March, the region apprehended 72 migrants. Maine’s numbers are extremely low compared to rest of country, where the busiest entry point in El Paso, Texas saw 1,959 migrant encounters in April.

However, Maine has been long been considered an outpost for the agency where even during the migrant crisis under Biden, monthly encounters were as low as 4 people a month. According to figures released by the federal government, the number of illegal immigrants arrested in the coastal state have steadily increased under the Trump administration. In December, when Biden was still president, there were only 18 encounters. That number jumped to 50 when Trump took over in January. They increased again in February to 52, and then to 72 in March, before peaking at 113 last month.

In fact, in the first six months of fiscal year 2025, Houlton Sector has already surpassed all total number of apprehensions it saw the previous year. ‘Due to the significant increase in arrests, the Houlton Sector coordinated air transport with Immigration and Customs Enforcement – Enforcement Removal Operations (ICE ERO) to transfer 29 apprehended subjects from Portland, Maine on Sunday to other parts of the country for further processing,’ the department said in a press release. Border Patrol leaders claim the increase in arrests is due to increased enforcement in the lighthouse-dotted state as overall crossings on the US-Canada boundary are down.

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