The agency told a judge it ‘inadvertently removed’ the 31-year-old Portland resident after misidentifying him during the January enforcement surge.

Domingo Tot Quip was waiting at a Portland bus stop with a co-worker on a frigid day in January when an unmarked car pulled up. Federal immigration agents stepped out. Tot Quip and his co-worker were arrested.

About a week later, the 31-year-old Portland resident was loaded onto a plane and deported to Guatemala.

There were two problems: First, although Tot Quip is from Guatemala, he didn’t have a deportation order. Second, the day before the flight a federal judge ordered ICE not to remove him from the country.

Agency representatives admitted in court filings months after the arrest that they “inadvertently removed” him because they had mistaken him for someone else from Guatemala with the same first name and birthday.

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Tot Quip’s arrest and erroneous deportation highlight many of the concerns raised about the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown. Dozens of others across the country have been wrongfully deported over the last year as enforcement has ramped up in an effort increase the number of removals.

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ICE said it had identified more than 1,400 “targets” in Maine, which it said included the “worst of the worst” criminals. But the vast majority of people arrested here did not have criminal histories — including Tot Quip, according to his attorney, Kerry Doyle.

“He had his documents on him, with his true name and date of birth and everything. He would have no record because he’d never had any interactions with ICE previously,” Doyle said. “I literally don’t know how they managed to deport him as somebody else.”

Following his arrest, Tot Quip was processed at Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Boston field office before being transported to a deportation staging facility in Louisiana.

Now, some six months later, Tot Quip is set to return to the U.S. next week, Doyle said. The return flight will be at the government’s expense.

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“People in Maine’s Latin American community are terrified right now,” Doyle said. “They see that you’re brown and they just arrest you. They don’t ask questions, they don’t look at your documents, they don’t care. They just take you.”

She attributed ICE’s errors to arrest quotas the agency has reportedly set for itself. While ICE officials have repeatedly denied claims that the agency sets target numbers for arrests, Trump adviser Stephen Miller has publicly stated the administration aims to make “a minimum of 3,000 arrests” every day.

Doyle said an emphasis on arrest numbers and increasingly aggressive tactics leaves more room for ICE agents to make mistakes in their course of duty.

“On one end of the mistakes, we see people getting shot,” she added, referring to Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero’s death in Biddeford at the hands of an ICE agent. “On the other, we see them deporting someone wrongly.”

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In an April court filing, assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Sauter wrote ICE had received a court order “prohibiting (Tot Quip’s) transfer or removal from the United States” on Jan. 27, six days after he was arrested and one day before he was ultimately deported.

Sauter attributed the deportation to ICE agents’ misidentifying Tot Quip during his arrest. When Doyle filed a habeas petition days after the arrest, asking the government to prove it was holding Tot Quip lawfully, the name on the petition did not match the name ICE had processed him under.

“ICE was unable to identify” Tot Quip as a result, Sauter wrote.

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But Doyle said her client, like many immigrants, is fearful of what may happen when he gets back.

Though the U.S. government will expedite his parole application to allow legal reentry, there is a real possibility that ICE will seek to deport him again as soon as he returns, she said.