“About a thousand kids every day on average during that operation weren’t going to school,” said James Myall, a policy analyst with the Maine Center for Economic Policy. He added that the immigration raids caused much fear in Maine’s overall minority population – in part because most of the non-white population is itself the same as the foreign-born population.
This rang true for Torres. For many people of color, he said, “the target on your back just got bigger … in a state where you already stand out.”