The Sheriff Who Spoke Up

Kevin Joyce, the sheriff of Cumberland County, Maine, held a press conference during ICE’s January enforcement surge in the state to criticize the agency’s tactics. The day before, federal agents had arrested one of his own corrections officers — Emanuel Ludovic Mbuangi Landila, an Angolan immigrant whom Joyce described as “squeaky clean” and who had passed multiple background checks and held a valid work permit. The day after the press conference, ICE served the county with a subpoena demanding employment data on every person who had worked at the Cumberland County jail since January 2025. The county complied. ICE separately began moving detainees out of the jail, which had housed federal detainees under a long-standing contract; an agency spokesperson said it could no longer partner with a jail that employed an “illegal alien.”

Joyce had spoken publicly. The subpoena and the contract termination followed within hours and a day, respectively. The Bangor Daily News notes that the formal reason for the subpoena has not been articulated by the agency. The sequence — a federal agency, criticized by a local official, demands employment records on that official’s entire workforce — reads as either coincidence or signal; the article does not name it as one or the other, but Maine sheriffs are not numerous, and other Maine sheriffs may now have opinions about whether to hold press conferences.