On July 13, ICE agents in Biddeford, Maine shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian father, during a vehicle stop outside his house. He was not the person they were looking for. His three-year-old daughter was seen crying afterward. Maine erupted.
There was no body camera footage, because the agents in Biddeford did not have body cameras.
Two and a half weeks later, Susan Collins had an announcement. She had sat in on a meeting with ICE's acting director, and she told Semafor:
"By the end of August, body-worn cameras will be deployed nationwide and worn by all ICE agents in the field. At my request, Acting Director Venturella agreed to prioritize their delivery to Maine."
Read the second sentence again. The nationwide rollout is being paid for with $20 million Congress had already appropriated. The thing she asked for, and got, was Maine's place at the front of the line.
Here is what she left out
At 2:48 in the morning on June 5, the Senate voted on an amendment setting aside at least $300 million to put body cameras on immigration officers — and to store the footage and make it available to Congress and to the people in it.
Collins voted against it. It failed 46-53.
Less than two hours later she voted to give ICE $70 billion with, as The New Republic's Greg Sargent put it, zero reforms attached — no oversight requirements, no transparency requirements, no accountability of any kind. Our own breakdown of that vote walks through what was in it.
So the sequence is:
- June 5, 2:48 a.m.: Vote no on $300 million for bodycams and releasable footage.
- June 5, 4:42 a.m.: Vote yes on $70 billion for ICE with no strings.
- July 13: An ICE agent kills a young father in Maine, with no body camera footage of what happened.
- July 30: Announce that ICE will have cameras by the end of August, Maine first, at her request.
She voted against the money and against the rule that would have let his family see the footage. Then, when an agent with no camera killed a man in her state, she went and asked nicely instead — and took the credit.
A request is not a law
Notice what she actually secured. Not a rule. Not a statute. Not an enforceable mandate with penalties for agents who turn the camera off.
A commitment. From an agency. In an interview.
We already know how much those are worth with this administration, because Collins tried the same move in the days right after the shooting. She said she had privately talked to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, and credited herself with getting him to halt non-urgent ICE vehicle stops.
It did not hold. We wrote about what happened next: ICE's own leadership paused most vehicle stops for a safety review after two men were killed in a single week — Durán Guerrero in Maine and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, neither of them the intended target. Only hours later, Trump reversed his own secretary and ordered the stops to continue.
Collins's private assurance from the Homeland Security secretary lasted a matter of hours. Her private assurance about cameras is the same kind of promise, from the same people.
The difference between an amendment and a request is that one of them survives the next phone call.
This is her signature move
If this feels familiar, it should. It is the exact pattern Mainers have watched for years.
Two weeks ago, Collins ran an ad saying she "stood up for Maine" on Medicaid — after casting the procedural vote that let the cuts reach the floor in the first place.
On Iran, she voted against five straight attempts to stop the war — March 4, March 18, March 24, April 15 and April 22 — saying that passing such a resolution "would send the wrong message to Iran and to our troops." In mid-April she let it be known that her position would "very likely" change if the fighting ran past 60 days. On April 30, with that deadline arriving, she voted to end it and issued a statement about it. The resolution failed 47-50.
The formula never changes:
- Cast the vote that does the damage, when it counts.
- Cast the symbolic vote against it, when it doesn't.
- Issue the press release.
It has kept her in office in a state that Trump lost by seven points in 2024 — a state no Republican presidential candidate has carried since 1988.
What Mainers are actually being asked to accept
Strip away the press release and the trade is simple.
Susan Collins gave ICE $70 billion and, two hours earlier, voted down the $300 million that would have put cameras on the agents spending it. An agent then killed a man in a Maine driveway with no camera running. And her answer is a promise that the agency will start wearing them, sometime in August, with Maine's shipment first because she asked.
Troy Jackson's campaign put the question to her directly: "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."
She hasn't. And she isn't likely to be asked in person — Collins has not held a public town hall in over 25 years.
Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero's family will never get the footage of what happened to him. That's not because the technology didn't exist. It's because the Senate voted on whether to pay for the cameras and release what they record, and Maine's senator voted no.
Source
Greg Sargent, "What Susan Collins Just Did on Trump and ICE Should Worry All Dems", The New Republic, July 31, 2026. Additional reporting: Maine Public. Photo: Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images.
