Maine voters face a Senate race where the incumbent funnels billions to ICE and then asks it to leave her state, while her challenger calls the agency cruel but won't admit he's running on a socialist platform — leaving working Mainers to sort out who actually represents their interests on immigration.
The stakes sharpened after two events: a January ICE surge that swept up more than 200 people in the Portland and Lewiston areas, including some with no criminal records and others navigating the legal asylum process; and a July shooting in Biddeford where an ICE agent killed 25-year-old Colombian asylum seeker Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, who was not the target of that morning's operation. State and federal probes into the shooting remain open with no clear timeline, the Portland Press Herald reported.
Sen. Susan Collins, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, called the shooting "tragic" and pointed to her support for $20 million in body-camera funding and $2 million for deescalation training. But agents at the Biddeford scene had no functioning body cameras. Collins said she asked the Trump administration to pull ICE back from Maine after about a week, and in August she said all ICE agents in the state now had body cameras.
The pullback request came after Collins cast a crucial April vote to hand $70 billion to ICE and Border Patrol — a Republican-backed measure that only two Republicans, Lisa Murkowski and Rand Paul, opposed. Collins says she supports ICE's existence because its work goes "far beyond immigration enforcement." So the pattern is clear: write the check, then complain about how the money gets spent.
Jackson, the former Maine Senate President, takes the opposite rhetorical position. He told the Press Herald that ICE's "cruel tactics" led to Guerrero's death and has questioned whether the agency should exist at all. But when it comes to his own political identity, Jackson gets slippery.
The New York Post reported that Jackson is now downplaying his ties to the far left. During his gubernatorial run, the Maine Democratic Socialists of America endorsed him — something he proudly touted on social media. Left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, infamous for saying "America deserved 9/11" in 2019, declared on X: "troy jackson is him!" When asked about Piker, Jackson told Crooked Media's podcast: "No, I honestly had never. I actually didn't know a lot about him either."
Asked on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" whether he backs the national DSA platform — which has called for abolishing the executive branch, the Senate, and making the Supreme Court subservient to Congress — Jackson said simply: "No." He told CNN he doesn't "really consider myself anything" when pressed on the socialist label.
Jackson currently leads Collins by 1.8 points in the RealClearPolitics polling aggregate, though the Post noted Collins has a history of massively overperforming her polls.
The Press Herald framed the race as a clear policy contrast on immigration. The Post framed it around Jackson's socialist baggage. What neither outlet pressed is the structural question: Collins funds the enforcement machine and then wrings her hands when it operates as designed; Jackson denounces the machine but won't own the ideology that would dismantle it — and has tied himself to a national organization that wants to abolish the Senate he's running to join.
Maine voters deserve to know: is this a choice between immigration enforcement and open borders, or a choice between a Republican who talks tough while writing blank checks and a Democrat who talks tough while running from his own record?
