Bad Food, No Showers: Migrants Protest Outside Portland Expo Over “Awful Conditions,” Uncertain Future Benefits

Roughly 100 migrants protested outside of the Portland Exposition Building Wednesday morning, briefly blocking traffic along a busy Park Ave, to raise alarm about the “awful conditions” inside the shelter, with one man telling the Maine Wire that there was not enough food and limited ability to shower.

The migrants also complained about the uncertain future they face when taxpayer-funded benefits paying for their accommodations run out later this year.

“We have children here, but the life is not very good,” said Reagan Mayemba, a migrant staying at the Portland Expo.

Mayemba said that they will be “kicked out” in August without any housing or food.

“We don’t have the housing, we’re waiting for somebody,” Mayemba said. “The condition here is not good. We don’t make shower, no good food, no house.”

“The staff is there, but they’re doing nothing for housing,” he said.

“Those responsible who put us here at the Expo, said that there is no more solution for us. That’s why we cry out and want help. S.O.S.” One sign posted along the sidewalk outside the Expo said.

At one point during the protest, after the road had been cleared, a City of Portland truck pulled over outside of the Expo and an employee tried to remove the signs posted on the sidewalk.

The migrants yelled out for the employee to stop, and the employee reentered the truck and drove away.

Reporters from several of Maine’s media outlets have been prohibited from inspecting conditions within the shelter since it opened back in April.

Although several migrants said conditions inside the shelter were poor, and some even tried to bring journalists into the shelter to see for themselves, City of Portland employees prohibited multiple reporters from entering the building to inspect conditions Wednesday morning.

One TV crew from WGME was kicked out of the building after migrants had invited them in to see what the shelter looked like.

A Maine Wire reporter had a door shut in his face after requesting access — when asked why, the Expo worker said “Because I said so.”

The City of Portland said in April it had adopted no-press policy in order to protect the privacy of the migrant families, many of which include young children.

On two occasions, people who appeared to be City employees refused access to the Maine Wire while also refusing to give their names, positions, or confirm whether they work for the City or non-governmental organizations.

The Portland Expo, where the then-Maine Red Claws (now Maine Celtics) basketball team hosted home games, first opened as a family shelter for migrants in 2019 when the present wave of immigration from sub-Saharan African nations began.

That wave of migration was triggered when former Portland Mayor Ethan Strimling invited the Trump Administration to send migrants to Portland. Strimling continues to stand by his decision, despite the crises and now deplorable shelter conditions to which he contributed.

At the same time Portland’s ad hoc emergency facilities remain at or over capacity, Portland’s streets are replete with more than one-hundred Mainers living in tents, many of whom are suffering from substance use disorder and have trouble getting treatment resources and emergency housing.

Already there are indications that the problem Portland’s leaders created will not be contained to the Greater Portland area.

In May, several carloads of asylum seekers arrived in Sanford, Maine unannounced, triggering a small crisis that quickly exploded the municipalities General Assistance (GA) budget.

Currently, Unity College in New Gloucester is negotiating an arrangement that would house some migrants at the campuses’ facilities. The negotiations are still in the early stages, but one source has told the Maine Wire it’s something the Mills Administration is actively considering.

[RELATED: Migrant Crisis: “No More Capacity” Says Sanford Police After 23 Angolan Families Arrive Seeking Shelter…]

The Expo closed in time for the Red Claws to begin their basketball season in 2019; however, the government lockdowns in response to COVID-19 came as a curveball to migrant and homelessness policy in southern Maine.

Two tranches of federal money, the first authorized by former President Donald Trump and the second under President Joe Biden, allocated funding for the Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA) program.

Although some states imposed a citizenship test on eligibility for that funding, Maine did not.

As a result, ERA funding paid to house thousands of migrants in hotels, motels, and homeless shelters, mostly in the Greater Portland area. In addition to the ERA money for housing, the migrants have been able to receive General Assistance (GA) welfare through various municipalities, most of which is reimbursed by the State.

Throughout this time, migrants have continued to arrive in Maine, with more than 1,000 having arrived this year. The migrants, mostly from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola, arrived in the U.S. as part of a wave of asylum seekers, with many of them reporting having first crossed into the U.S. at the border with Mexico.

The extent to which those arrivals are being facilitated by the Biden Administration is unclear.

On March 31, the Biden Administration provided the City with a memo advising it on how to deal with busloads of migrants arriving from the southern border; however, the Department of Homeland Security has not responded to inquiries and Freedom of Access Act (FOIA) requests that might shed light on how and why migrants continue to arrive in southern Maine.

That federal ERA money expired at the end of 2022, almost creating an eviction crisis in the middle of winter.

However, a last minute spending deal and some later spending agreements in Augusta set aside relatively small amounts of money to fund migrant housing until later this summer.

Maine’s migrant policy has generally lurched from one crisis to the next, and this summer appears to be no exception.

The Portland Expo opened again in April 2023 after shelters and motels in the Great Portland area reached capacity.

The Expo similarly reached capacity in less than one week.

The rate at which new migrants are continuing to arrive in Maine is currently unclear, but the pressure on emergency housing facilities is about to be exacerbated by a new city ordinance in South Portland that will prohibit hotels and motels from serving as de facto homeless shelters, as the have for the past three years.

This story will be updated.