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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.

After NSPM-7, the federal agency is building a real-life Minority Report predictive policing system with AI.

The Trump administration is not making its case against Anthropic.A federal judge flamed the government during a hearing Thursday, noting that Justice Department attorneys had failed to provide evidence “justifying” the Defense Department’s decision to class the AI company as a national security risk, or Donald Trump’s subsequent order barring federal agencies from utilizing the company’s services.California-based U.S. District Judge Rita Lin literally spelled out the questions she would ask the government’s attorneys via a legal notice earlier this week, but the DOJ still failed to impress. Lin remarked at the outset of the hearing that, “if anything, it seems like the record in some ways has gotten worse for the government,” according to the Law & Crime network.In May, Lin blasted the government for the “Orwellian” way that Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attempted to sever ties with the AI contractor after Anthropic refused to grant the Pentagon unrestricted use of its AI bot, Claude, for military purposes.At the time, the president and Hegseth claimed that Anthropic had gone “WOKE” for arguing that Claude could not safely or reliably be used for “autonomous lethal warfare and mass surveillance of Americans.”“Having reviewed the record that the parties have submitted on the cross motions for summary judgment, it appears to me to be largely the same as the record that I assessed at the preliminary injunction stage,” Lin said Thursday. “I don’t see additional evidence from the government really justifying what it did.”She added that she found it “really troubling” that the Trump administration was taking a position that “seems at odds to me with the First Amendment,” in “threatening to take away contracts from anyone who might do business with them” by “labeling them as subversive.”Lin even posed a hypothetical question: whether it would be unconstitutional for the government to terminate “every defense contract with anyone who’s ever publicly criticized President Trump.”When DOJ lawyers hedged, Lin said, “I’m surprised that you can’t give a yes to what seems to be an easy question.”

The State Department has set a $20,000 bond for some tourists and business visitors who seek a visa to enter the U.S.The finalized plan, published by the State Department on Friday, requires visitors from a select list of countries to put up a bond of $10,000, $15,000, or $20,000, which would be paid back when their B1 or B2 visa expires. The pilot program for the bonds was introduced last year, and affected 50 countries.Most of the affected visas last about three months, but some of them are for 10 years, meaning that visa holders wouldn’t get their money back for a decade, American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick noted. The move is guaranteed to further hurt the U.S. tourism industry at a time when it is already struggling thanks to Trump administration policies.During the World Cup this summer, the Trump administration suspended the bonds for anyone who had a ticket to one of the games. But many fans still were unable to attend, including the relatives of some of the players, thanks to a separate travel ban and other visa restrictions.Trump’s immigration policies have cost the country billions of dollars in tourism and also caused prices of goods and services to go up for Americans. U.S. visa policies have also hurt international student enrollment and in turn led to a big drop in revenue for universities and colleges. Now that this visa bond program is being finalized, the U.S. is set to only further suffer economically.

Zohran Mamdani’s tenure as New York City mayor has raised hopes of a more invigorated, deeper form of democracy and posed a question facing progressive mayors everywhere: how to translate the grassroots energy that brings them to office into a sustained movement for change. In our new book, The Power and Perils of Participatory Democracy: Participatory Budgeting and Democracy [...]

Expiration of federally funded contracts will leave some 20,000 children to face deportation proceedings alone.

The White House’s “Ice Maiden” has gotten involved to salvage Donald Trump’s SAVE America Act.Chief of staff Susie Wiles made a rare appearance on Capitol Hill Wednesday to implore top Senate Republicans to pass the wildly unpopular voter restriction bill ahead of the midterm elections.“This was her attempt to say to [Senate Majority Leader John] Thune and [Senate GOP Whip John] Barrasso [that] ‘A lot is stalled in the Senate. SAVE/reconciliation ... nominations ... what can we do?” a person familiar with the discussion told Politico via text Thursday.Wiles was also interested in discussing efforts to end the filibuster, a Trump priority that the upper chamber has repeatedly rebuked. The stalled succession of acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was not mentioned, multiple sources told Politico.The discussions were “candid” but not immediately productive, according to the unidentified source.“Thune basically said: I want to move the president’s agenda whenever it has the votes,” they added.Wiles’s visit has been interpreted as a deliberate attempt by the White House to smooth over ruffled feathers and keep the president’s political priorities on track—particularly after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt put Thune on blast last week, sharing with reporters during a White House press conference that Trump’s patience was “running out” on the SAVE Act.“He wants to see as much of the SAVE America Act passed by the August recess,” Leavitt said at the time. “He knows that’s what the American people want to see passed.”Thune was quick to hit back, bluntly stating that the caucus simply didn’t have the votes.That timeline would offer Senate Republicans just five more business days to pass the controversial legislation, which promises to ban mail-in voting and institute new voting policies that would require voters to prove their identities via either a birth certificate or passport in order to access the ballot box.“You can’t show how high the importance of this issue is to the president other than bringing in Susie,” a former Trump adviser told Politico. “If there is an ability to land it, the president is certainly putting pressure on Susie to land it. It’s still an uphill battle.”

A first-of-its-kind survey by the UFW Foundation quantifies the impact of Trump’s mass deportation campaign on farmworkers, the vast majority of whom are undocumented. The post Top Farmworker Fear Is Family Separation appeared first on The American Prospect.