Maine Sen. Susan Collins Under Fire for Being the Deciding Vote on ICE Funding

The killing of 26-year-old Colombian immigrant Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero by ICE agents in Biddeford, Maine, has put the sparsely populated state back in the national spotlight amid the ongoing fallout from a sexual assault allegation that led insurgent Democratic nominee Graham Platner to suspend his campaign for Senate. The nomination will now be determined by Maine Democratic Party delegates in an accelerated — and more crowded — version of the race’s contentious primary. Platner had been running to unseat longtime Republican incumbent Susan Collins, a supporter of Donald Trump and his administration’s intensifying immigration enforcement policies. Protesters chanting “Vote her out!” marched to Collins’s office after Durán Guerrero’s shooting was made public. Collins was the deciding vote to approve an additional $70 billion in federal funding for ICE last month. “Voters all across Maine, they don’t think there is a way to reform this agency. They think it needs to be abolished,” says Nathan Bernard, a Drop Site News correspondent in Maine.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re also joined by Nathan Bernard, who is a correspondent for Drop Site News, his most recent piece headlined “In Letter, Platner Volunteer Network Warns Dems: Nominee Must Back Same Agenda to Win Our Full Support.” Why bring that in now with this tragedy today? Because, of course, what’s happening now is happening on behalf of the U.S. government, so politics really matter right now.

Nathan, if you can talk about what we know at this point? You have the information relayed by the independent Maine Senator Angus King that the 26-year-old Colombian man, Joan, had been given an — that he was not the target. Now, it was Angus King who released this, and not the federal government originally. And then you have these mass protests in the midst of the senatorial race, and who is senator certainly matters, with Senator Collins being the deciding vote on the tens of billions more dollars that went to ICE and CBP. Can you talk about what the people who are running right now are saying and doing? Are they participating in the protests?

NATHAN BERNARD: Yeah, yeah. There was a vigil in Portland where several of the candidates — Nirav Shah, Troy Jackson — both attended and gave speeches calling to abolish ICE. And —

AMY GOODMAN: Nirav Shah is the former health official.

NATHAN BERNARD: — I know from the volunteers in the Platner campaign —

AMY GOODMAN: Just to give a global context for people who aren’t following this closely, Nirav Shah is the former health official in Maine, and Troy Jackson is the logger in Maine who has also announced he wants to run.

NATHAN BERNARD: Yeah, Nirav Shah was our CDC director during the COVID pandemic. Troy Jackson was the former Senate president, a Democrat who, like you said, is a third-generation logger.

I think there’s a lot of — there’s a lot of angst. There’s a lot of frustration with Susan Collins. Not only did she vote to fund ICE with another $70 billion, she was the deciding vote for that. And when that $70 billion passed, there was no accountability. I mean, just like we saw in Houston, the ICE agents there were not wearing body cameras. The ICE agents in Biddeford were not wearing body cameras. And just like Eisha was talking about, this is the community. Community is having to watch these folks. Community is having to document ICE’s actions.

And a big push from the volunteers from the Platner campaign and voters all across Maine are that they don’t think there is a way to reform this agency. They think it needs to be abolished. They think that no more funding should go to ICE. And we see, when more funding does come to ICE, what happens. The funding was just released. We now have a death, a tragic death, in Houston; we have a tragic death in Biddeford, Maine — a big city and a small town in completely different parts of the United States.

So, I think — I think people want to hold Susan Collins accountable for her role in this. And when we look at accountability again, DHS in Boston is now going to investigate what happens here in Maine. So, we have DHS investigating DHS. It’s a situation where all of the candidates that — I shouldn’t say all the candidates. The majority of the candidates that are running right now know that if they’re going to get the support of the 150,000 voters who just voted for the Platner campaign, a platform of economic populism, progressivism, built from the grassroots, that they’re going to have to express intent explicitly to end the mass deportation system that we have.

So, it’s going to become a huge issue. It already was a huge issue here in January. There was an enormous rally in Lewiston, Maine, the day that Alex Pretti was killed, under very similar circumstances. And we’ve seen so many instances of this across the country, and I really think that now that this has come to Maine in such a visceral, violent way, that it’s going to become a huge issue in the Senate campaign.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Nathan, you talked about back in January. That’s when the Department of Homeland Security initiated Operation Catch of the Day in Maine. And can you talk about the arrests that happened then, and also about the change from last year to this year in ICE tactics? Before, they were doing well-publicized raids, with Kristi Noem, the head of Homeland Security, actually participating and bringing the media with her. Now they’re actually trying to do it more quietly, but at the same time ramp up the number of arrests per day?

NATHAN BERNARD: Yeah. I mean, I believe Amy noted that the agency, ICE, is looking to make 2,000 arrests a day. And when Operation Catch of the Day happened here in January, when the surge happened, they detained somewhere around 200 people. Only, I believe, 10 or 11 of those people allegedly had any sort of target, they were the target of any sort of warrant from ICE. Many of them were immediately pulled from their families, sent to out-of-state detention centers. And it happened so rapidly and in, that time, a very public way. I mean, it’s the same as in Minnesota, where it’s as much of making a spectacle and a show of these detentions, in the most disgusting, gruesome way possible, to show that they’re getting close to hitting their numbers, that it really hasn’t, in my eyes, become any less public.

Now, I know that Susan Collins took credit for ending Operation Catch of the Day. Back in January, she said that this was all going to come to an end, and she took credit for it ending. On the back end of that, again, she funded another $70 billion to ICE without any strings attached. So, those things are such at odds with one another. And even after the Operation Catch of the Day slowed their tactics and operation, there were still hundreds of calls coming in about ICE in our communities. ICE never left Maine. And I think that what happened with Joan Sebastian Guerrero is a perfect case of showing that they never left, and they’re just as violent. He was not the target of a warrant from ICE — not that it should matter. But he was literally just going to work in the morning to let his family have a dignified life, to put a roof over his 3-year-old daughter’s head, his wife’s head. There’s so many, again, going back to community, eyewitnesses’ accounts that have come out not just on this case, but across the months since January that have shown that ICE is still here, they’re still active. And with the killing of Guerrero, it’s so tragic that there’s no way, aside from us, the people living in Maine, to show what happened here. So, the operations never, never slowed, really. Maybe they’ve become less public. They didn’t become less violent.

AMY GOODMAN: We will continue to follow this and the so-called investigation that’s taking place. Nathan Bernard, correspondent for Drop Site News, we’ll link to your latest piece, “In Letter, Platner Volunteer Network Warns Dems: Nominee Must Back Same Agenda to Win Our Full Support.” And Eisha Khan, we thank you so much for being with us, wife of the Biddeford mayor, speaking to us from Biddeford.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, major election news. President Trump is expected to give a primetime address on so-called election integrity Thursday night, and the DOJ has quashed a subpoena investigating election results from 2020 in Fulton County, Georgia. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Contra Todo,” “Against Everything,” by the Puerto Rican singer-songwriter iLe, performing at our Democracy Now! studio.