Susan Collins Wants a Medal for the Bodycams. She Wrote ICE the Blank Check.

Politics has a smell, and this one is unmistakable: the reek of a career politician taking credit for the fire extinguisher after voting to hand out the matches.

Here is the sequence. On Thursday, Collins told NEWS CENTER Maine that ICE agents will begin wearing body cameras the first week of August, a rollout paid for with $20 million she secured in the DHS appropriations bill¹. She wants that credit, and she wants it loud. She told Semafor the deployment is happening "by my request."⁶ You're welcome, Maine.

Now the part she'd rather you forget. Collins voted to give ICE $70 billion in funding with zero reforms, and is now trying to turn the issue in her favor.⁶ Her Democratic challenger put it plainly: 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.⁶ That's not spin. That's arithmetic.

The cameras did not materialize out of Collins's conscience. They materialized out of a corpse. On July 13, an ICE agent fatally shot 26-year-old Johan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, a man officials say was not even the intended target of the operation. The officer who fired was newly sworn-in. Guerrero left behind a wife, a 3-year-old child, and a sister. Two hundred million dollars of political maneuvering, and a father is dead on Pool Street.

Collins's response was the response she's built a thirty-year brand on: concern, expressed at a safe distance. She said the Biddeford shooting "requires a full and impartial investigation of what happened." She said on X the case "raises sufficient critical questions" and that she urged DHS Secretary Mullin to cease all non-urgent vehicle stops. Fine words. But she wrote the check that put an undertrained agent on that street with a badge and a gun and no camera. The concern is retail. The vote was wholesale.

And who's been fattening the war chest while she splits the difference? Nearly 100 billionaires and their spouses have poured almost $10 million into Collins's campaign network since the start of 2025, and not a single one is a Maine resident. The marquee name: Blackstone billionaire Steve Schwarzman gave $2 million to a pro-Collins super PAC on June 27, one day before Collins cast a decisive vote to advance Trump's tax bill on June 28. A bill, mind you, projected to kick at least 10 million people off their health insurance. The timing is either the luckiest coincidence in Maine political history or an ATM with a cowboy hat on top. You decide.

Mainers seem to be deciding. This week the field firmed up: former state Senate President Troy Jackson officially became the Democratic nominee at Saturday's convention in Bangor, launching a 101-day sprint in a race that could decide control of the Senate. And the numbers are ugly for the incumbent. A University of New Hampshire poll conducted July 15-20 shows Jackson leading Collins 49% to 46%, with 88% of Democrats behind Jackson and independents breaking his way, 46% to 42%. The five-term senator, underwater on favorability, is now running a bodycam ad campaign disguised as a Senate career.

So spare us the ribbon-cutting, Senator. The cameras are a memorial, not an achievement. You don't get to light the fire and bill the state for the smoke detector. MUCK YOU.