Not long after a federal agent killed a Colombian immigrant in Maine last week, Senator Susan Collins rushed to declare that she’d privately talked to Donald Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary, Markwayne Mullin. Collins credited herself for getting Mullin to end the vehicle stops by agents that have spawned many killings on the streets of U.S. cities, including the deaths of American citizens.
Only hours later, Trump abruptly reversed Mullin’s decision, decreeing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s reviled tactics will continue. “We CANNOT give up one of ICE’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” Trump raged. The stops resumed, undercutting Collins’s effort to project deep concern about the killing.
The incident neatly captures how Trump, through his handling of this horrific ICE shooting, is inadvertently screwing over Collins and complicating her path to reelection. The shooting is a real problem for Collins: It highlights her votes to fund Trump’s rampaging paramilitary forces and her feckless refusal to rein in his worst abuses of power. It localizes a national issue and could viscerally mobilize Maine voters against her. And it allows Democrats to try to seize the offensive on turf that has historically favored Republicans.
“Susan Collins is directly responsible for handing ICE a blank check,” Devon Murphy-Anderson, executive director of the Maine Democratic Party, told me. “This is front and center now in our communities. And we are going to hold her accountable in November.”
Can Democrats turn the ICE shooting into a serious liability for Collins and shift the broader moral debate over immigration their way? It should be very doable. Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was gunned down after agents boxed in his vehicle outside his home in Biddeford, and his three-year-old daughter was seen crying after the incident. He has been widely described as a devoted father and hard worker who was in this country legally.
Nor was Durán Guerrero the intended target of the enforcement operation to begin with. And the agent who pulled the trigger, David Brouillette, has been described by relatives as mentally ill, violent, dangerous, and a domestic abuser. This horror raises profoundly grave questions about how ICE is recruiting, now that Trump and Stephen Miller are staffing up their deportation army at breakneck speed and unshackling it to carry out violent ethnic purges on a mass scale. It’s here that Collins deserves severe censure and should be politically vulnerable.
Democrats, for instance, plan to make an issue out of a little-noticed vote by Collins not long before the shooting. In early June, Collins opposed an amendment, offered by Democratic Senator Alex Padilla, that would have required ICE agents to wear active body cameras on duty and made footage available to Congress. The amendment was defeated on party lines amid passage of $70 billion in new ICE funding, which Collins voted for even though it utterly lacked guardrails against future abuses.
These votes could now create bigger problems for Collins. As it turns out, the ICE agents involved in the killing of Durán Guerrero were not wearing body cameras. Collins is now insisting that she secured certain protections against ICE this year, such as $20 million for expanded bodycam use and other minor safeguards. But if ICE’s latest shootings confirm anything—agents also recently killed a 52-year-old immigrant father in Texas—it’s that such half measures are entirely useless in holding back the monster that Trump and Miller have unleashed.
Collins’s reelection depends in part on perceptions of her willingness to take on Trump, including on immigration. But her approach has accomplished nothing. ICE agents have dragged their feet in using bodycams despite money being appropriated for it, and Trump’s ICE forces have shot around two dozen people, killing six. If anything, ICE has now been supercharged by the $70 billion she voted for. Her little safeguards will prove as constraining as an old picket fence in the face of a megaflood.
So Democrats can argue that only lawmakers who are prepared to fully deploy congressional power to grind ICE’s killing machine to a halt deserve office. “Collins is accountable for getting us here,” Murphy-Anderson of the Maine Democratic Party told me. “She has stood with Trump and ICE at every single juncture.”
Obviously it will still be very hard to defeat Collins. The race is super-close: A new poll finds Collins’s almost-certain challenger, Troy Jackson, leading her by 49 percent to 46 percent, a statistical tie. She’s a resilient politician with deep ties to her state. Some pundits still argue that ICE matters to the Democratic base far more than to swing voters—and that Democrats must tread carefully on the issue. It’s at least possible this will prove correct.
But there’s reason to doubt this in Maine. A recent New York Times poll found that only 42 percent of Maine likely voters approve of Trump on immigration, while 56 percent disapprove. Among independents those numbers are a stunning 39-61. So vowing to rein in ICE may well appeal to many in the middle.
What’s more, highly engaged voters will likely dominate in the midterms, and the outcome will partly turn on which side is more energized. Democrats in the state say the ICE killing has ratcheted up the energy big time among both Democratic voters and older women, who play an outsized role in Maine elections. As Murphy-Anderson put it, this is “viscerally” playing “across broad segments of our electorate.”
Then there’s how Jackson, the Democratic challenger, will handle the issue. A former social conservative who has adopted progressive populist views over the years, he declared of the ICE killing: “This rogue agency must be abolished.” It does remain to be seen how that will play among moderate voters.
But it’s a key tell that Collins is at least trying to appear concerned about voter anger at ICE: The energy is plainly on the anti-ICE side. What will probably matter most is which candidate speaks to voters’ revulsion over these killings with more force and emotion, and which can offer a clear path out of this madness while promising to restore the rule of law. Collins can’t do this persuasively. Jackson can.
Ultimately, Collins’s biggest problem on this front may be the true nature of the Trump-Miller project. Ask yourself this: Why did Trump suddenly restart the vehicle stops that Collins had just boasted of stopping?
The answer is obvious. Trump and Miller want immigrants and their allies to receive their message loud and clear: They have no real intention of dialing ICE down even when—especially when—it results in horrific killings like this one. ICE recruitment relies heavily on explicit white nationalist messaging that is quite openly enraptured with purging and purifying the nation via unchecked paramilitary aggression. Trump and Miller want all this to be fully understood by Americans as exactly what it is: A violent ethnic cleansing project that you should perpetually fear and loathe as an inevitable fact of life under the brutality of Trumpian rule.
Collins is proceeding as if Trump is capable of acting conventionally—as if he’ll willingly moderate to help vulnerable Republicans in bluer areas, or treat mass removals as a mere law enforcement operation that’s subject, as is typical, to reform when it results in violent, terrifying excess. But the violence and the terror are the point. Broadcasting that ugly fact far and wide matters a whole lot more to Trump than Collins’s political survival does. And in the end, there’s always this: She just voted to fund a whole lot more of it.
