An agency with $20 million in new body camera money killed another man without recording what happened.

"I watched a wife fall to her knees looking at her husband's dead body on the ground. I watched a little girl crying with a little pink backpack on because she's never going to see her father again."

— Mary Hayes, neighbor of the victim in Biddeford, Maine

A 26-year-old Colombian man authorized to work in the United States was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent on Monday morning in Biddeford, Maine. It was the second fatal ICE shooting in seven days. It was at least the ninth death linked to federal immigration enforcement since Trump returned to the White House. And it came with the same troubling absence that has defined every recent ICE killing: no body camera footage to show what actually happened.

Security camera video from a nearby business shows a white vehicle approaching an intersection at a modest speed, making several slow circles before an unmarked law enforcement SUV blocked its path. Two officers opened the driver's door and dragged out a limp body. The video does not show when shots were fired.

DHS said agents were surveilling an address connected to someone with a final order of removal. When they attempted to stop a vehicle leaving the address, "the vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon." Maine Senator Angus King said Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told him the officer fired because the driver tried to use his vehicle as a weapon. DHS's own statement contained no mention of a weapon.

Translation: the official story is already splitting in two.

The man who was killed had legal authorization to work in the United States. Two immigrant advocacy groups, the Maine Immigrants' Rights Coalition and Presente!, confirmed he had been issued a Social Security number. The Colombian Embassy said it was providing consular assistance to his family. A neighbor told the Associated Press the man lived nearby with his wife and young daughter. A local laundromat owner said he brought his daughter in regularly and gave her quarters for the vending machine. "He was such a good person," she said. "He was always cleaning up."

The Maine Immigrants' Rights Coalition reported that immigration enforcement activity in the area appeared to continue even after the shooting, while authorities were still responding to the scene. Community members reported ICE activity and feared others could be detained or harmed while their neighbors were grieving.

A witness named Daniel Boucher looked out his third-floor window after hearing "pop, pop, pop." He saw a small car turned 90 degrees to the curb with an SUV behind it. "His face was bloody. His head was bloody," Boucher said. "I clearly heard the victim say, 'I tried to stop.'"

Boucher said he confronted the officer who shot the man. The agent's response: "He tried to run me over," or something to that effect. Boucher could not remember the exact words.

The Maine attorney general's office said initial evidence suggests the motorist was trying to flee in the direction of the agent. The officer has been placed on administrative leave.

The agents involved were not wearing body cameras. This is not because body cameras do not exist for ICE. This is not because the agency could not afford them. In April, Congress gave the Department of Homeland Security $20 million specifically for "the procurement, deployment, and operations of body-worn cameras" for officers carrying out immigration enforcement tasks. The same bill gave ICE and its parent agency billions in operating funds. Yet when two ICE agents pulled over a car in Biddeford, Maine, neither one had a camera on.

This is the third recent ICE killing without body camera footage. The agents who shot and killed 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston on July 7 were not wearing cameras. The agents who shot Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota this January were not wearing cameras.

Susan Collins, Maine's Republican senator and chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, was directly involved in the legislative fight over ICE body cameras. In January, after the Pretti and Good killings in Minnesota, Collins publicly refused to add language to the DHS funding bill that would have required ICE agents to wear body-worn cameras. She supported giving ICE funding to purchase the cameras, but stopped short of requiring them to actually use them.

The result is what we have now: an agency that can buy the equipment but is under no obligation to use it when it matters most.

Translation: Collins helped write a check for body cameras and then refused to mandate their use. Now a man is dead in her state with no recording of the killing, and she is calling for a "full and impartial investigation."

After Monday's shooting, Collins posted on social media: "The shooting in Biddeford requires a full and impartial investigation of what happened." She noted that Biddeford police had secured the scene and that the FBI was investigating. She did not condemn ICE's actions. She did not express sympathy for the man who was killed or his family.

Protesters showed up at Collins's district offices in Maine, chanting "Vote her out." Democratic Senate candidate Nirav Shah wrote: "Senator Collins voted for the Republican bill to give ICE another $70 billion to terrorize our communities with no accountability. Maybe sit this one out."

The political calculus is straightforward. Collins recently lost her scandal-ridden Democratic challenger, Graham Platner, who dropped out after sexual assault allegations. Republicans saw Platner's candidacy as their best path to holding a Senate seat in a Democratic-leaning state. Now Collins faces a replacement primary, an ICE killing on her watch, and a voting public that majority disapproves of how the agency is doing its job, according to new polling from Maine Beacon.

But the political story is secondary to the factual one. A federal agency is repeatedly killing people during immigration enforcement operations without recording the encounters. The senator from the state where one of those killings happened helped ensure the cameras would remain optional.

The broader numbers paint a picture of an enforcement apparatus running at maximum velocity. ICE arrested more than 10,000 people during a five-day period at the end of June, approximately 2,000 per day. The number of people held in ICE detention facilities climbed to roughly 39,000 during June. Meanwhile, 52 people died in ICE custody during the first 500 days of Trump's second administration, according to Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights, a mortality rate nearly four times higher than during the Biden administration.

Maine was not immune. ICE arrested 546 people in the state between the start of Trump's second term and March 11, the most recent data available. About 45 percent had criminal backgrounds. During the equivalent period before Trump took office, roughly 69 percent of those arrested had criminal backgrounds. The agency is increasingly targeting people without felony records, including people with unresolved immigration proceedings and people who were arrested but never convicted of a crime.

The pattern of fatal encounters inside vehicles is particularly alarming. The Wall Street Journal identified more than a dozen incidents between July 2025 and January 2026 in which federal immigration officers fired at people inside vehicles. DHS's go-to explanation has become consistent across multiple killings: the person "weaponized" their vehicle by driving toward officers.

Except that explanation depends on what the officer saw and how the officer interpreted it. Without body cameras, it is the agency's word against everyone else's.

Several hundred demonstrators gathered in Biddeford on Monday evening to wave anti-ICE signs and call for the agency to be abolished. Maine Speaker of the House Ryan Fecteau, a Democrat from Biddeford, told the crowd: "We will always be a city of immigrants."

The question is not whether the 26-year-old man posed a threat. The question is whether an enforcement system that kills people without recording the killings can ever be trusted to answer that question honestly. The $20 million in camera funding sits in a budget somewhere. The cameras exist. They are simply not being worn.

An agency told the public it was going to be more transparent. Then it killed a man and had nothing to show for it.