The Trump administration this week started arresting immigrants in Maine as part of a new federal operation targeting the state, the Department of Homeland Security said on Wednesday.

Two U.S. officials said the operation was intended to target immigrants from Somalia, along with other immigrants. People from countries including Sudan, Guatemala and Ethiopia were swept up on the first day of the operations, according to a department statement.

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The operation comes after an enforcement surge in Minnesota, which set off protests. Thousands of D.H.S. officers and agents were deployed there, and their actions have come under scrutiny in the wake of the shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis this month by an ICE officer.

A number of asylum seekers from African countries ​who arrived in the United States during the Biden administration have settled in Maine​, joining a Somali population that started arriving there in the early 2000s​, when refugees from the country began settling in Lewiston. Yet Maine remains an overwhelmingly white state, with one of the oldest populations in the country. Some employers have begun looking to immigrants to fill labor gaps, as native-born employees have either left the work force or retired.

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Mr. Dion said his early impression was that the operation in Maine would not involve “groupings of agents just patrolling,” and that it would instead focus on tracking down certain people “on the basis of an actual court warrant.”

He also warned residents against intervening in ICE’s actions, saying, “The best thing you can do is to be the best possible witness, should the facts that come before you be needed by any future investigation.”

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“We have approximately 1,400 targets here in Maine,” Patricia Hyde, the ICE deputy assistant director, told Fox News.

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