The fatal shooting of a Colombian man in Maine by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent has put pressure on Senator Susan Collins, with several of the Democrats seeking to challenge her criticizing her support for aspects of the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.
Ms. Collins sought to get ahead of the potentially damaging issue, saying Tuesday that after the shooting she had urged Markwayne Mullin, the Homeland Security secretary, to “cease all non-urgent vehicle stops,” which officials said the administration later did.
But several Democrats hoping to challenge Ms. Collins, a vulnerable five-term Republican, have seized on the incident, drawing attention to her votes to fund ICE and Customs and Border Protection and to confirm both of Mr. Trump’s second-term homeland security secretaries, Mr. Mullin and his predecessor, Kristi Noem.
Troy Jackson, a Democratic Senate candidate, said on social media Tuesday morning that ICE “must be abolished” and that “Susan Collins must be held accountable for funding this terror.”
Dr. Nirav Shah, another candidate, said there was a “straight line from Senator Collins to the tragedy that we saw yesterday.”
“Time and time again, she has handed ICE a blank check,” Dr. Shah said at a news conference on Tuesday outside Ms. Collins’s office in Biddeford. “What we have seen from Senator Collins is a pattern of enabling.”
The Senate race in Maine has been consumed with the scramble to replace Graham Platner on the ballot, after his campaign imploded last week. Mr. Platner, the former Democratic nominee, dropped out of the race after a rape allegation that he denied.
Now the shooting, which prompted a strong public outcry, has pushed immigration to the center of the race. As chair of the Senate committee that oversees government spending, Ms. Collins has voted to fund ICE, but has also pushed for various safeguards to prevent abuses.
Jordan Wood, another Democratic Senate candidate, argued that the shooting had underscored the stakes of the race.
“If Maine needed a reminder or wake-up call for why this race to defeat her is so important, we got one,” Mr. Wood said in a phone interview. “Susan Collins has never had the courage to stand up and meet the moment.”
Many details about the Monday incident, in which an ICE agent shot and killed a man in a vehicle in Biddeford, remained unclear on Tuesday. It was the second fatal episode in a week, as the Trump administration continued its immigration crackdown, and was the latest in a string of encounters between agents and people in cars.
In January, Ms. Collins declined to call for Ms. Noem to step down after ICE agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minnesota, splitting with two of her centrist Republican Senate colleagues, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.
On Tuesday, Ms. Collins suggested that Democrats were politicizing the shooting, and that their attacks on her were “absurd.”
“It’s disappointing to see potential candidates use a tragedy to try to advance a political agenda,” Ms. Collins told reporters at the U.S. Capitol.
She said she’d had three conversations with Mr. Mullin on Monday, urging him to order ICE officers to halt their stops of vehicles. By Tuesday, the Trump administration had taken the step of prohibiting most stops.
Ms. Collins also pointed to funding she said she had secured for body-worn cameras, de-escalation training for ICE officers and investigations into misconduct.
“I’m the one who argued for all of the safeguards,” Ms. Collins said.
A spokeswoman for Ms. Collins, Blake Kernen, said in a statement that abolishing ICE would make America less safe and would put a halt to “critical efforts to combat human trafficking, child exploitation, forced labor and international drug smuggling.”
Ms. Collins has long taken a cautious, middle-of-the-road approach to immigration that “has opened her up to a fair amount of criticism from both sides,” said Mark Brewer, a professor of political science at the University of Maine. “It’s not great for her,” he said. “She would have preferred just to let the chaos surrounding Platner and the Democratic Party’s replacement plan play out, and she could have kept her head down.”
Over the years, Ms. Collins has at times broken with Mr. Trump on immigration. In his first term, she described his ban on citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States as “overly broad” and “problematic.”
Last winter, Ms. Collins bristled at expanded ICE operations in Maine, issuing a statement expressing concern about “heightened tensions” between ICE and Mainers. “People who are in this country legally should not be targets,” she said.
The surge ended with federal agents abruptly retreating. At the time, Ms. Collins, who had faced protests outside her offices in Portland and Bangor over the crackdown, said in a statement that she had pushed “ICE to reconsider its approach.”
But in Maine, a Democratic-leaning state where Ms. Collins has defied political gravity for decades, most voters believe Ms. Collins would be too supportive of Mr. Trump if she is re-elected, according to a New York Times/Portland Press Herald/Siena poll conducted last month. The poll found 56 percent of Maine voters disapproved of Mr. Trump’s handling of immigration, compared with 42 percent who approved.
Ms. Collins has made few public appearances since Mr. Platner ended his campaign.
But she joined a parade in Republican-leaning Lisbon on Saturday. She was met with a mostly warm, enthusiastic reaction as she jogged down the route and worked the crowd, which had turned out to celebrate a New England soda called Moxie.
Along the route she passed Danielle Owens, a Democrat who splits her time between Maine and New Hampshire and had brought her Moxie-loving son to the parade. As Ms. Collins trotted past, Ms. Owens booed and shouted, “Shame on you.”
Growing up in Southern Maine, Ms. Owens, 41, had idolized Ms. Collins, she recalled. But she soured on the senator over time, she said. Ms. Owens said that as she grew close to immigrants in the Lewiston-Auburn area of Maine, she became disillusioned with Ms. Collins’s stance on immigration.
“If you’re from Lewiston-Auburn area, or you spend any time in the state of Maine, you know that immigration and refugees are a constant in that community,” Ms. Owens said. “So it’s always part of the conversation.”
Olivia Diaz and Madaleine Rubin contributed reporting.
