Collins Defends ICE's "Vital Safety Work" While a Toddler Wore Bluey Pajamas When Her Father Was Killed

Susan Collins picked an interesting week to defend an agency's honor. On Tuesday, a day after an ICE officer shot Joan Sebastian Guerrero through his windshield in Biddeford, Maine, in front of his three-year-old daughter, the senator told reporters ICE could improve but deserved defending against its harshest opponents. Guerrero wasn't the target of the operation, and he was driving to work when the agent fired. He lived in the country legally.

"There's no doubt that ICE needs to improve its performance. But those who are calling for ICE to be abolished altogether are ignoring absolutely vital safety work that ICE does."

Susan Collins has represented Maine in the Senate since 1996, building a three-decade reputation as one of the chamber's few remaining moderate Republicans. She has cast herself as an institutionalist willing to break with her party on high-profile votes, a reputation that has kept her competitive in a state leaning purple. This reputation carries weight in how her handling of Biddeford lands with voters heading into her reelection fight this fall.

Collins framed the abolition movement as a failure to account for what ICE does. Pressed on specifics, she named the department's portfolio, citing investigations into human trafficking, drug smuggling, international financial crimes, and child exploitation. These are real crimes and real casework, handled largely by Homeland Security Investigations, a division distinct from the uniformed enforcement teams conducting the traffic stops and workplace raids that generate most of the agency's controversy. Collapsing both functions into a single defense favored the senator's argument without addressing the incident that prompted it.

Details from the scene undercut her timing, as neighbor Nelson Elias told CNN he heard gunshots and found Guerrero on the ground with his wife and daughter beside him, while witness Cecelia Humiston told the Portland Press Herald the girl still wore her Bluey pajamas. A memorial appeared at the site within hours. Protesters gathered outside Collins's Biddeford office demanding her removal from office. The distinction between HSI's investigative caseload and ERO's street-level enforcement stayed factually accurate, yet raising it in a press conference two days after a fatal shooting read as deflection from the incident under scrutiny.

Two other fatal encounters preceded Biddeford, with federal agents killing Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston less than a week earlier and DHS agents killing Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis earlier this year. Angus King said the deaths add up to one argument, that ICE needs funding conditions. Three fatal encounters within months, spread across three states, formed the record a sitting member of the Appropriations Committee now had to answer for in public. Collins wasn't the only lawmaker facing that record, but she stands for reelection in the state where the most recent victim's memorial sits at the intersection of Hill and Pool Streets, blocks from her district office.

Collins made the problem worse by voting to fund the agency through 2029, part of a roughly seventy-billion-dollar package for the Department of Homeland Security. Thirty-eight billion of the total went specifically to ICE, earmarked for hiring, training, and equipping agents, with few conditions attached to how the money gets spent. Spread across the three and a half years remaining in that window, the ICE allocation works out to roughly eleven billion dollars a year, funding an agency the senator herself says needs improvement. She then pressed DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin to halt non-urgent vehicle stops, a policy ICE adopted within a day of her request, alongside a pledge to expand body camera use.

Her body camera answer raised a separate issue, since the June bill she voted for funded the cameras but never required agents to wear them. Neither agent involved in the Biddeford or Houston shootings was wearing one. Asked why Biddeford's agents lacked them, she pointed to a government shutdown that delayed the contracts, and noted larger communities received cameras before smaller ones like those in Maine. Funding equipment without requiring its use produced the exact outcome in Biddeford, an agent working without a camera during a fatal encounter, in a state where the program existed on paper but stayed optional in practice.

Troy Jackson and Nirav Shah, both seeking the Democratic nomination to face Collins this fall, used the shooting to call for the agency's outright abolition. Jackson tied Collins directly to the funding vote in public statements, and Shah told Fox News ICE in its current form should lose its budget entirely. King, working from information relayed by Mullin, raised a separate point about arrest quotas, saying pressure on agents to meet arrest numbers contributes to shootings like the one in Biddeford. Collins said she wasn't aware ICE officers face pressure to increase arrests, and added she'd be concerned if the claim proved true.

That answer sits oddly next to her seat on the committee that funds the agency. She approved eleven billion dollars a year for ICE and says she doesn't know whether it runs on arrest quotas. Voters have that answer on record this fall, alongside the funding vote and the body camera answer.

Funding an agency's better functions doesn't undo the outcomes produced by its worse ones, and a senator's choice to emphasize one over the other in the days after a fatal shooting counts as political positioning, regardless of how she describes the choice.

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

Copyright © 2026 Maria Santos Salinas for FRONTeras.

All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Sharing the original posts or links from FRONTeras on social media is allowed and appreciated.

FRONTeras is an independent publication protected by the First Amendment's guarantees of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Our reporting and commentary draw from documented facts, public records, court filings, and reliable news sources. Opinions expressed in editorials are solely those of the author and do not constitute legal advice, divine truth, or the official position of FRONTeras. All articles, whether news, satirical, or commentary, are produced according to journalistic standards of accuracy, fairness, and independence. While errors in reporting are possible, they will be corrected promptly once verified with credible sources. Critiques are grounded in evidence, not malice. Attempts to censor, intimidate, or punish the press will not alter the facts we publish. FRONTeras will continue to report without fear or favor.