Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) has been plunged into a new nightmare as President Donald Trump demolished an effort to escape having his Immigration and Customs Enforcement brutality tied to her, reported The New Republic.
Collins has been immersed in Trump's policies after a killing in Biddeford, Maine, in which ICE agents boxed in a vehicle and shot Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian immigrant described as a devoted father who was in the country legally. His three-year-old daughter was seen crying at the scene.
The dead man reportedly wasn't ICE's intended target, and the agent who fired, David Brouillette, has been described by relatives as violent and mentally unstable, even allegedly threatening violence against his ex-wife.
Collins denounced the killing — but after she backed a $70 billion new slush fund for ICE and "opposed an amendment, offered by Democratic Senator Alex Padilla, that would have required ICE agents to wear active body cameras on duty and made footage available to Congress," the New Republic reported.
That "could now create bigger problems for Collins" as the agents involved in the shooting weren't wearing cameras, according to the report.
Meanwhile, Collins tried to claim credit for a cooling down of tensions. But just hours after she publicly credited herself with getting Trump's Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to halt ICE vehicle stops following a deadly shooting in Maine, Trump blew up her victory lap entirely — ordering the stops to resume immediately.
Polls show Collins is in a tie with Democratic Party challenger Troy Jackson.
With Trump publicly overriding the very policy Collins claimed to have won, her attempt to appear tough on ICE may end up making her look powerless instead, the report concluded: "The violence and the terror are the point. Broadcasting that ugly fact far and wide matters a whole lot more to Trump than Collins’s political survival does.
"And in the end, there’s always this: She just voted to fund a whole lot more of it."