What Susan Collins Just Did on Trump and ICE Should Worry All Dems
Last month, an ICE agent gunned down a 25-year-old immigrant father outside his house in Biddeford, Maine. The shooting was a horror. His three-year-old daughter was seen crying after the killing. The victim has been widely described as a good man. The shooting spawned outpourings of protest in the state.Yet Senator Susan Collins, who recently voted to give ICE $70 billion in funding with zero reforms, is now trying to mitigate the issue as a liability or even turn it in her favor. And I fear this is something that Democrats—who almost certainly must defeat Collins to win the Senate—have to take seriously.Collins told Semafor in an interview that she’s personally secured a new commitment from ICE to require all agents to wear bodycams going forward. “By the end of August, body-worn cameras will be deployed nationwide,” Collins said, emphasizing that this is “by my request.”Collins’s effort to take credit for this is ridiculous. She voted for the aforementioned no-strings-attached $70 billion, which will supercharge ICE’s paramilitary operations in countless awful ways. She also voted against an amendment in early June that would have required bodycams. The commitment she’s secured from ICE is a joke in comparison to all she’s done to empower it.But it’s absolutely possible that Collins’s bodycam gambit—and other tricks she might cook up—could nonetheless soften this issue’s impact on her reelection effort. Democrats cannot let that happen.Here’s why this is a concern: It’s exactly the sort of tactic that has made Collins a wily, resilient survivor in the Democratic-leaning state of Maine. Gestures just like it have persuaded many Mainers that she’s independent of the national party and Donald Trump and, importantly, that she fights for the state.Collins will say, in other words, that after this horrific ICE shooting, she aggressively represented Maine’s interests and directly took on the Trump administration to do so. Again, it’s preposterous. But note this: There are already examples of local press coverage crediting her with securing ICE bodycams. The headline from one Portland-based outlet reads: “Collins says ICE agents will start wearing body cameras by end of August.”If you want to know how Collins keeps getting reelected in a state that Donald Trump lost by seven points in 2024, one that no Republican presidential candidate has carried since George H.W. Bush in 1988, take a gander at those press clippings for a clue.To be fair, Maine Democrats are pushing back hard on Collins’s ploy. “Collins’s support handed ICE $70 billion with no guardrails,” the campaign of Democratic challenger Troy Jackson told me in a statement. “If she wants credit for a bodycam headline this week, she can start by explaining why she voted to fund ICE with a blank check and zero accountability attached.”What’s more, Democrats assure me they take seriously the need to prevent Collins from turning the tables on ICE in any way. They say Collins is already in deep trouble on inflation and health care, issues that will drive the race. They doubt Collins can use ICE bodycams to establish her independence in the face of those other overwhelming problems. Even if she tries, they say, it will only remind people of her votes to empower ICE.But the worry here is not that Collins can suddenly campaign aggressively to transform ICE into a uniformly winning issue for herself. She’ll still have to tiptoe around it. What can happen, however, is that she starts citing the securing of bodycams in a longer litany of things that demonstrate her willingness to take on Trump on Maine’s behalf.Put it this way: It’s not hard to imagine ads from the Collins campaign addressing ICE appearing on Mainers’ televisions before Democratic ones do. Such an ad would not be all about ICE. But it might highlight her move on bodycams as a bullet point among others establishing her “independence.” The problem is that preventing this might require Democrats to put real money into their own ads attacking her over ICE. They may still do this; earlier this year, the Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC launched $2 million in ads targeting Collins this way. But that was months ago, and the latest ICE shooting has galvanized Mainers anew. Top Democrats tell me no decision has been made on whether to run ads on this going forward.All of which has bearing on the interminable argument among Democrats over how hard to lean into ICE and immigration. Democrats should stick to kitchen table issues instead, we keep hearing, since voters care about them more (or worse, they should avoid immigration entirely because it automatically favors Trump). But the Maine race underscores why this sort of advice is mostly useless.Look: Even if you accept that economic issues matter more to voters than ICE does, surely Collins shouldn’t be given free rein to cite ICE bodycams as a signifier of her fighting independence, with little or no Democratic paid media pushback. It would be perverse if Collins ads mention ICE before any Democratic ads do. This issue is ripe for taking on aggressively. A new CNN poll finds that Americans say ICE makes our cities less safe by a 20-point margin. It finds that only 39 percent approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, versus 61 percent disapproving—a 22-point deficit. Among independents, that’s a staggering 34–66.That’s not all. A recent Fox News poll finds Democrats essentially even with the GOP, 50–49, on which party would do a better job on immigration. And on the issue the new Strength in Numbers and Verasight poll also finds Democrats almost tied with the GOP. While other polls still put Republicans ahead, public opinion is plainly moving in Democrats’ direction. Jackson, the Democratic challenger, is for abolishing ICE, and it’s unclear how that will play with moderates. But it’s good that he’s already willing to take on ICE very aggressively. Midterms are referendums on the party in power. Trump and ICE are both hideously unpopular. Democrats should proceed as if that presents an opportunity—because it does.Collins knows she’s on defense. After the recent shooting, she announced she’d privately gotten Trump to agree to end ICE vehicle stops—which he promptly upended by continuing them. Yet Collins—a resourceful politician—quickly came back with this new bodycam ruse. This time the administration may help her pull it off by delivering on bodycams—and letting her take credit for it.It’s plausible—or even likely—that Democrats will figure out how to foil this scheme. Still, the problem is absolutely worth worrying about and thinking through right now. As we’ve already seen, Collins is very, very good at this sort of political alchemy. Democrats should think seriously about putting real money into thwarting it.