Trump Badly Screws Susan Collins as Maine ICE Death Takes Darker Turn

Collins cast some recent votes that can help likely Democratic challenger Troy Jackson tie her to Trump and to ICE. And there’s evidence that both liberals and moderates will listen.

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.........

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