The Tuesday evening meeting of the Wells Board of Selectmen began with smiles and applause for the steady work of the town’s finance department. The shouting began about 40 minutes later.

The deep divisions that have defined modern American politics were on display in Wells’ packed Town Hall, where dozens of residents gathered to share their thoughts on the police department’s controversial partnership agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Several residents asked the select board to step in and review or freeze the agreement that Wells Police entered into with the federal agency last month. The partnership, the only one of its kind in Maine, allows Wells officers to perform certain immigration enforcement tasks otherwise reserved for federal officials.

Opponents warned that the deal could undermine the town’s reputation as a friendly, welcoming community and possibly expose it to legal liability.

“I’m here to express my strong opposition to the police department collaborating with an agency that … operates in ways that are immoral, inhumane, unconstitutional, illegal, and just plain sloppy and cruel,” said Bishop Rosemary Ananis, the retired pastor of St. Francis of Assisi Old Catholic Church in Wells. “My faith tells me that the alien is also my neighbor.”

Each rebuke of the town’s partnership with ICE brought a round of applause from meeting attendees. But others who spoke in favor of the agreement drew loud support from another corner of the audience.

“We take comfort and pride in the initiative and leadership demonstrated by Wells among Maine town police departments,” Nancy Ford read from a letter of support for the police department that she said has received about 50 signatures. “We cannot maintain a family friendly character in Wells if it is not safe.”

No item related to the agreement was on Tuesday’s agenda, and select board members took no action and offered no comment except to quiet the crowd when the meeting threatened to devolve into incivility.

“We talk about division. We talk about coming together and having conversations, but we can’t even do it in this room,” board Chair John MacLeod said after one man repeatedly interrupted another speaker with shouts about undocumented immigrants being criminals.

About a dozen speakers shared their thoughts on the ICE agreement before the board voted to close the public comment period, prompting a mass exodus of meeting attendees.

Wells made headlines last month when it became the first police department in Maine to enter into a formal agreement with ICE through the agency’s 287(g) “task force model” program. The deal, finalized on April 2, allows local officers who have completed an ICE training course to do immigration enforcement work usually reserved for federal officials, according to a sample memorandum of agreement posted to ICE’s website.

Since President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, the Department of Homeland Security has prioritized building partnerships with local law enforcement agencies in order to carry out the mass deportations Trump promised throughout his campaign. Yet while these agreements are common in states like Florida and Texas, they remain rare in most of the Northeast, and attempts to form them in Wells and Monmouth have drawn swift pushback.

Wells Police Chief Jo-Ann Putnam, who did not return a message requesting an interview on Tuesday, told the York County Star last month that she saw the partnership with ICE as an opportunity to get her officers new training at no cost to the department, not as a fundamental shift in the way her team will operate day to day.

But at a moment when experts say agencies like ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol are intentionally sowing confusion and fear within immigrant communities in order to drive self-deportations, some advocates say partnering with federal officials could negatively impact public safety by eroding trust in police.

The Maine ACLU has called the Wells agreement “dangerous and potentially costly.”