ICE Contractors Reward Susan Collins’ Loyalty with Campaign Donations
PHOTO: Mainers protest outside Sen. Susan Collins office for supporting ICE funding in August. Photo by Channa Steinmetz, Maine Beacon.
Monday is the three-month anniversary of the ICE killing of 25-year old delivery driver Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford and his murderer still has not been brought to justice. In U.S. Senate debates last week, Sen. Susan Collins was forced to defend her votes to provide over $100 billion to supercharge ICE without any guardrails to protect civil liberties and prevent more murders of innocent people.
Collins strongly opposes dismantling the lawless agency that functions like President Trump’s personal paramilitary force. That isn’t surprising since she has received over $130,000 from top ICE contractors —including Palantir Technologies, CoreCivic and the Geo Group — that are profiting off Trump’s vicious mass deportation policies. Before the second Trump administration, Collins received just $2,850 from ICE contractors, their employees and PACs.
Executives from the tech company Palantir, best described as the “surveillance backbone” for ICE, have donated $117,000 to PACs supporting Collins, including $100,000 from Palantir executive Alex Karp to the pro-Collins super PAC Pine Tree Results one month after she voted in 2025 to advance an eye-popping $70 billion for immigration enforcement, more than most foreign military budgets. In fact, according to campaign finance reports, Collins received the fourth most money from Palantir executives and its PAC out of all Senators between 2006 and 2026.
Co-founded by pro-Trump billionaire Peter Thiel in 2003, Palantir received a $30 million contract from the Trump administration to use artificial intelligence and data mining to identify, track, and deport suspected noncitizens. Civil liberties groups have raised serious concerns that Palantir’s automated “Immigration0S” surveillance platform uses flawed data to make enforcement decisions, bypassing traditional due process and disproportionately targeting Black and brown people.
ICE has even been dumping photos of protestors and legal observers into their Palantir-supported data database to track and intimidate people exercising their First Amendment rights. Newly unsealed court documents just revealed that ICE agents added eight Mainers to a U.S. Department of Homeland Security database in January during ICE’s so-called “Operation Catch of the Day” enforcement surge. Maine resident Caryln Williams was added to the DHS Investigative Case Management (ICM) after agents spotted her car at a location where people were filming immigration officers in South Portland. However, Williams was not driving the car, her spouse Plyxenia Pantos was.
A DHS agent later called Williams to warn Pantos, “not to do anything like that in the future because people who are doing things like that might get added to a domestic terrorism watchlist,” according to court documents. Two months later, Williams and Pantos were detained for an hour by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at the Canadian border after their names were flagged in the ICM system. They have since joined two other Maine residents in filing a lawsuit asking a federal judge to prohibit immigration agents from entering people legally exercising their First Amendment rights into the “domestic terrorist” database. It’s bone chilling that the President and his minions can target anyone as a potential “domestic terrorist” for legally observing federal agents and using their free-speech rights.
In addition to Palantir, executives and board members of the private prison company CoreCivic contributed over $9,500 to Susan Collins. Last year, CoreCivic reported record profits after receiving billions of dollars from the Trump administration to run detention facilities to house detainees seized in ICE raids. In an earnings call, the company called the mass incarceration of immigrants to be a “significant growth opportunity,” thanks to a $45 billion budget Senator Collins voted to advance in the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. In February, CoreCivic CEO Patrick Swindle assured investors that Trump’s immigration crackdown would pick up, bringing in more revenue to warehouse men, women and children. More than half of the 3,500 detainees that have been housed in CoreCivic’s Dilley Immigrant Detention Center in South Texas were minors.
In August, Texas Monthly reported that the Dilley facility has been routinely holding migrant kids five times longer than court orders allow. Psychology Professor Maryam Tahmasebi, her husband, Seyed Eissa Hashem, and teenage son were all detained by ICE after the U.S. government revoked their green cards because her husband’s mother was a translator for the Iranian hostage takers in 1979. They have been reportedly detained at the Dilley facility for over six months “with swarms of cockroaches, spiders and mosquitoes”
“We have been put through hell for the past four months, and our physical and mental health have deteriorated in ways that might not be reversible for years,” Tahmasebi wrote in the Nation in August. “We are only allowed to speak with my husband for 10 minutes every two weeks, under supervision.”
Less than a month after the murder of Johan Sebastián Guerrero, Collins took $3,500 from the private prison company Geo Group, which operates 19 ICE detention centers housing roughly one-third of all immigrant detainees. With $2.6 billion in revenue in 2025, GeoGroup has profited handsomely from billions of dollars in funding that Collins advanced in the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. The company also has a horrible human rights record, detaining a record 600 immigrant kids for an average of six months in 2025.
At Geo Group’s Folkston facility in Georgia, 73 people recently launched a mass hunger strike to protest abhorrent conditions including substandard medical care, lack of air conditioning, threats by GEO Group guards, routine collective punishment, moldy food and a lack of due process. Many of them came to America fleeing persecution and violence in their home countries and are fighting to obtain asylum in immigration courts.
“Many of us have been separated from our families,” reads their open letter signed by 45 detained immigrants. “We have missed births, funerals, years of our lives while sitting behind fences without having committed any crime.”
In June, a Geo Group detention facility in Newark, NJ put down a separate hunger strike of immigrant detainees protesting inhumane conditions, including inedible food and poor treatment by guards. The facility transferred a number of detainees out of the jail to punish them for dissenting and threatened to put others in segregation to break the strike.
Susan Collins has made a lot of excuses for ICE as it continues to murder, abuse and jail people without due process. She claims that without ICE we wouldn’t be able to deport dangerous criminals, despite the fact that more than 70 percent of ICE detainees do not have a criminal conviction. As her opponent Troy Jackson has pointed out, we also have plenty of other law enforcement agencies like Customs and Border Protection that handled the job before ICE was created in 2003.
After the Guerrero murder, Collins promised that ICE agents would wear body cameras by the end of August after voting against an amendment requiring them. Even after ICE carried out its massive raids on our communities last winter, Collins voted lockstep with Republicans in April to provide an additional $35 billion dollars for the lawless agency without any reform measures. So, it’s a little late for her to suddenly call for ICE to be reformed because she is being forced to defend her unconscionable votes in the final weeks of her re-election campaign. Her campaign donations and her votes to supercharge ICE’s paramilitary operations speak for themselves. If you want to continue to prop up this fascist surveillance state that targets marginalized communities and critics of the Trump regime, vote for Susan Collins. But if you believe in due process and a humane immigration system, vote for Troy Jackson.