What Susan Collins Just Did on Trump and ICE Should Worry All Dems

She voted for $70 billion in no-strings-attached ICE funding. But now she’s taking credit for a new bodycam commitment from ICE. Democrats can’t let her get away with this.

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........

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