Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) pushed back on claims by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) that she included safeguards for Immigration and Customs Enforcement after ICE shot and killed a man in Biddeford on Monday.
She was speaking after ICE shot and killed Joan Sebastian Guerrero shortly after 7 a.m in Biddeford. Guerrero was authorized to work in the United States. Witnesses to the shooting said that a distressed family yelled “you took her dad” alongside a child who “couldn’t have been older than three” still in her Bluey pajamas, the Portland Press Herald reported on Monday.
The shooting comes as Collins faces a difficult re-election in Maine, a state that voted for Kamala Harris. Many of the Democrats who are running in the mini-primary to replace scandal-plagued Graham Platner excoriated Collins, who is chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and therefore writes the budget for ICE.
“Senator Collins wrote the blank check to allow these officers to conduct themselves in the way that they have in Maine in the first place, and she’s the one who’s poured resources into it,” Ocasio-Cortez told The Independent. “And just because now that there’s live footage of the atrocities that she has enabled, doesn’t make it better than preventing them from happening in the first place.”
Specifically, Democrats criticized her for voting to give ICE and Customs and Border Protection $70 billion earlier this year.
Collins did so on a party-line vote after a months-long shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security. Democrats and Republicans voted for a bill to fund all of Homeland Security except for ICE and CBP. Republicans then voted on a separate party-line bill to fund ICE and CBP. This came after an ICE official shot and killed Renee Good and CBP officials shot and killed another protester, Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis.
In response, ICE reportedly said it would temporarily halt traffic stops of vehicles, according to an email obtained by The Atlantic.
“I discussed that possibility with the Secretary of Homeland Security and urged him to proceed with a halt in non-emergency vehicle stops,” Collins told The Independent when asked about it.
But Ocasio-Cortez criticized the fact that it took another killing for this to happen.
“I mean, they’re just trying to cover for the fact that what they are doing shouldn’t be allowable in the first place,” she told The Independent. “And the fact that they’re pausing it is to distract from the fact that in many of these instances they shouldn’t be allowed to do it in the first place.”
Collins said that ICE remained a necessity to investigate human trafficking, child exploitation, drug smuggling, weapons smuggling and international financial crimes, but there needed to be safeguards.
“So, I am also very eager to get the body-worn cameras out to all ICE officials, it should be mandatory,” she said. Collins then pointed out that she brokered a deal with Democratic Vice Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) to include $20 million for body cameras for ICE, funneling $12.8 million to oversee money spent for President Donald Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” legislation and $20 million for independent oversight of ICE detention facilities.
Those provisions came in a stopgap spending bill after the killing of Good. But Democrats largely came out against funding the Department of Homeland Security after CBP officials killed Pretti.
Collins also lamented the shooting when The Independent asked what her message would be to the family of Guerrero.
“It appears to have been a horrible tragedy,” she said. “We don’t have all the facts yet, and that’s why the investigation, which is being conducted by the state attorney general’s office, by the FBI, and by the independent office of Inspector General out of Boston is so important, but it’s always a tragedy when someone is killed.”
Democrats and some Republicans criticized the fact that the federal government has not done a comprehensive probe into the killings of Pretti and Good. That ultimately led to the shutdown and the eventual resolution.
