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 ICE agents don't wear body cameras.
Two and a half weeks later, Susan Collins had an announcement. She told Semafor she had personally gotten ICE to change that.
"By the end of August, body-worn cameras will be deployed nationwide and worn by all ICE agents in the field."
And she made sure to add that this was happening "by my request."
Here is what she left out
In early June, the Senate voted on an amendment that would have required ICE agents to wear body cameras.
Collins voted against it.
Then 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: Vote no on requiring bodycams.
- June: Vote yes on $70 billion for ICE with no strings.
- July 13: An ICE agent kills a young father in Maine, with no footage of what happened.
- July 30: Announce that she has personally secured bodycams.
She voted against the requirement. Then, when the absence of that requirement produced exactly the outcome the requirement was designed to prevent, she went out and asked nicely for it — and claimed 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 three weeks ago. After the Biddeford shooting, she announced she'd privately gotten Trump to agree to end ICE vehicle stops.
He kept doing them. We wrote about that: 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. One day later, Trump overruled the pause.
Collins's private assurance from the president lasted about 24 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 every Democratic attempt to stop the war for 60 days, saying it "would send the wrong message to Iran and our troops." Then, once the War Powers Act's 60-day clock had run out on April 30 — when the vote could no longer change anything — 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 refused to attach a camera requirement to 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, 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 require it, 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.
