How Congress can rein in ICE—and start to redeem itself

How conscientious a public servant is Senator Susan Collins? She is the first senator in history to cast more than 9,800 votes without ever missing a roll call. How skilled a politician is she? She is the first senator from Maine to be popularly elected to five consecutive terms, and the only Republican senator to represent a state that Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, won in 2024. How powerful is she? She is the chair of the almighty Senate appropriations committee, with control of all discretionary spending by the government.

And how courageous is Susan Collins? Politicos have been wondering that for many years, and America may be about to learn. Fate and her decades of astute politicking are conspiring to present her with a rare opportunity of national leadership at a moment of extraordinary stress in American life—a chance to ease the tension, affirm Congress’s role as a check on the executive branch and defend Americans’ civil liberties. As Senate Democrats threaten to shut the government down rather than finance Donald Trump’s approach to mass deportation, she has the authority to broker a compromise to place common-sense limits on the tactics used by agents of the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

She also has the credibility to do so: Ms Collins has regularly ranked first among senators in the annual “bipartisan index” kept by the Lugar Centre, a non-profit, and Georgetown University’s public-policy school. And she even has a good, parochial reason to act. Her home state is the latest to be targeted by ICE though, like Minnesota, it is not exactly swarming with undocumented immigrants; about 10,000 are estimated to live there, or roughly 0.7% of the population. Already there are reports of abuses, including detentions of people who are in the country legally.

So far, as is her way, Ms Collins is proceeding cautiously. After a second American citizen was shot dead by immigration agents while protesting in Minneapolis, on January 24th, she called for an independent investigation. She has said she is “exploring all options” on funding the government.

Maine has a history of sending independent-minded politicians to Washington. Ms Collins’s fellow senator, Angus King, is an independent, albeit one who caucuses with the Democrats. But a particular historical legacy haunts this political moment. Margaret Chase Smith was a freshman Republican senator from Maine in 1950 when she rose to defend Americans’ free-speech rights against the red-baiting of Senator Joseph McCarthy. “As an American, I condemn a Republican fascist just as much as I condemn a Democrat communist,” she said in a floor speech that went down in history as her “Declaration of Conscience”. It was the brave beginning of McCarthy’s eventual end.

Ms Collins has cited Smith as a role model, but is also said by those who know her to grind her teeth at the suggestion, over the years, that she needed to rise to a “Margaret Chase Smith moment” as if she has never done so. She has broken with her party on important votes. She opposed the impeachment of Bill Clinton and supported Barack Obama’s stimulus. She provided a crucial vote to save Obamacare when Mr Trump wanted to repeal it. She voted to acquit Mr Trump in his first impeachment trial but to convict him in his second. Yet over the long haul, among insiders on Capitol Hill, she gained a reputation for choosing to demonstrate independence when Republicans had a solid majority, while supplying a reliable vote when the margin was narrow.

For many of her left-of-centre constituents, Ms Collins, who is pro-choice, revealed herself as a conventional partisan by voting in 2018 to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, saying she believed he would not vote to curtail abortion rights (he did). “The day she voted for Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court was the day I lost hope for Susan Collins,” says Safiya Khalid of Lewiston, Maine. As she tries to help residents cope with the ICE crackdown, Ms Khalid, who runs a non-profit called the Community Organising Alliance, has no expectation Ms Collins will do more than talk. “Right now we don’t want lip service,” she says. “We want action.”

Ms Khalid may be right not to expect much. Mr Trump’s change of tone on Minneapolis may reassure Ms Collins, and other anxious Republican legislators, that the crisis is over. It isn’t. With his metastasising deployment of immigration agents, Mr Trump has set precedents for vast new powers of a national police force answerable to the White House alone—precedents that he or a future president could invoke again.

Without undermining immigration law, Ms Collins could lead congressional negotiators to set boundaries: to ensure federal agents who harm people will be subject to credible independent investigations; to forbid agents to wear masks except under limited circumstances; to forbid them to break down doors without judicial warrants; to forbid them, at least until the Supreme Court weighs in, to engage in “Kavanaugh stops”, the un-American practice, named after a concurrence by Justice Kavanaugh, of demanding proof of citizenship from people on the street based on their perceived ethnicity.

Ms Collins is running for a sixth term this autumn. With the primary filing deadline in March, she may fear drawing a Republican challenger. But Mr Trump has already said Ms Collins, along with four other Republican senators who voted to curtail his war powers after the Venezuela raid, “should never be elected to office again”. As the most vulnerable Senate Republican, her best chance at re-election may be to reclaim the centre on matters of foundational principle. It is more surely her best chance, at 73, to set an example America needs now, and will honour in future. ■