Emily Allen

1 week ago | sunjournal.com | Dari Alpi |Morgan Womack |Emily Allen

Gratien Milandou-Wamba thought he’d done everything right. The 32-year-old said he fled from the Republic of the Congo after being tortured and threatened in prison over his connection to an opposition party. So, he decided to leave behind his home in Brazzaville, his family and his career as a firefighter. “I was not living like a normal person,” Milandou-Wamba said. “I was hiding myself.”He arrived in the United States in May 2023, got a tourist visa and started to apply for asylum.

1 month ago | centralmaine.com | Emily Allen

A federal judge has issued an emergency order halting the deportation of a Maine man who says he had been held illegally by immigration officials at the Cumberland County Jail for eight months. Federal court records indicate that at some point after the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine filed a habeas corpus petition on Friday on behalf of Eyidi Ambila, 44, the government had already begun to deport Ambila, moving him out of the court’s jurisdiction.

1 month ago | pressherald.com | Alex McCann |Emily Allen

Potentially hundreds of rural Mainers who bought their homes through a government loan program are about to be hit by what state housing advocates have called a “tsunami” of foreclosures, the origins of which remain unclear. For decades, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development office has offered low-income, first-time homebuyers all over the country a chance at homeownership through Section 502 loans.

2 months ago | pressherald.com | Amber Carter |Emily Allen

Doctors believe Roy and Janet Palmer could have spent another decade together. More yearly trips to the Fryeburg Fair, more nights spent watching NCIS and NASCAR races, more spontaneous day trips and visits with family. Janet Palmer thought they’d still have that future when she dropped her 69-year-old husband off at the Togus VA Medical Center in Augusta five years ago for abnormal stomach pain.

2 months ago | pressherald.com | Julia Arenstam |Emily Allen

An emergency law allocating $3.5 million to address Maine’s public defense crisis took effect Wednesday without the governor’s signature. Maine is struggling to provide legal representation to everyone who has a constitutional right to a court-appointed lawyer if they can’t afford one on their own. The situation had grown so dire that a judge in Kennebec County recently ordered that people who have waited longer than two weeks for a lawyer start to be released from jail.