Troy Jackson Entered Politics Fighting Foreign Labor. Now He Wants to Abolish ICE

Today, Maine Senate candidate Troy Jackson advocates for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and says an immigrant workforce is essential for the state’s economy.

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But nearly 30 years ago, it was his anger over foreign workers taking away jobs from Maine loggers that drove him into politics in the first place.

Jackson, a fifth-generation logger who grew up in a small town in Maine near the Canadian border, was famously involved in a 1998 protest where American loggers used pickup trucks to block a road near the Quebec border to keep out Canadian workers, who were often paid lower wages by U.S. companies. The weeklong standoff ended with Jackson and two other loggers being escorted away by police.

When that protest and others that followed inspired little change, Jackson unsuccessfully ran for the state legislature as a Republican in 2000. He has explained that he had “no concept of parties” but chose to align with the GOP because he knew the Bush family had ties to Maine and respected that.

Today, Jackson’s politics are a far cry from where he started. A progressive Democrat whose unsuccessful gubernatorial bid earlier this year received the backing of the Maine chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, Jackson has been tapped by state Democrats to replace disgraced Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, who was forced to drop out of the race after sexual assault allegations against him came to light. Jackson will now take on incumbent Senator Susan Collins (R., Maine) in Platner’s place.

And while Jackson was, for many years, a pro-life opponent of gay marriage who was largely in favor of restrictionist immigration policies as they pertained to labor, today he is as progressive as his controversial predecessor in the race.

Across a 20-year career in the state house and the state senate, his views on social issues in some ways shifted alongside the rest of the Democratic Party — President Obama did not come out in favor of gay marriage until 2012, just a few years after the party dropped, from its official platform, the idea that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.”

But on immigration specifically, Jackson’s evolution appears to have been influenced most of all by labor unions.

The one-time logger has long had a strong relationship with the labor movement, including the Maine AFL-CIO. His first successful bid for state legislature came in 2002 as an independent, but he formally joined the Democratic Party the next cycle, explaining that he felt aligned with Democratic lawmakers who pushed to allow independent logging and trucking contractors to collectively bargain with landowners. Jackson has received the endorsement of dozens of local unions and also earned a perfect voting score from the Maine AFL-CIO in 2024, his last year in the state legislature.

At the time that he entered politics, driven by his outrage over cheap Canadian labor taking jobs from American loggers, the AFL-CIO’s position, like Jackson’s, was to support employer sanctions and restrictions intended to protect U.S. workers from labor-market competition.

But in February 2000, the federation of unions dramatically reversed its long-held position, moving in favor of legalizing undocumented workers, organizing immigrant workers and expanding worker protections. The federation’s argument moved away from a focus on the downward pressure high immigration exerts on wages and toward faulting employers for exploiting workers who lacked legal protections.

The AFL-CIO’s shift had a self-admitted financial incentive: Its leaders said in the 2000 statement that “newly arriving workers continue to make indispensable contributions to the strength and growth of our unions.” The change came just five years after John Sweeney took over the AFL-CIO in 1995 looking to reverse the long decline of organized labor.

In fact, by 2017, the AFL-CIO acknowledged that immigration policy is “core union business,” pointing to the “millions of immigrant workers who are current, dues paying members of our unions.”

Meanwhile, the Service Employees International Union has made immigrant organizing central to its broader strategy. The Maine affiliate of the SEIU, which represents some 13,000 public employees and retirees, ranked Jackson its first choice for governor this year. The immigration cause is so intertwined with the SEIU’s mission that the president of the union’s California chapter, David Huerta, was arrested earlier this year after he led a group that attempted to block federal immigration agents from executing search warrants in Los Angeles. California Policy Center president Will Swaim has described the California chapter as an “open-borders lobby shop that also organizes workers.”

“Our movement — building power for working people — isn’t just for those who have called the U.S. their home since birth. It’s for everyone,” the union says.

Still, as recently as 2009, Jackson was hosting reporters on ride-alongs where he scanned radio traffic for French voices and made unannounced visits to logging job sites to inspect for Canadian workers.

But his rhetoric on the issue today is nearly ripped from the AFL-CIO’s playbook.

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“Canadians are great people. That’s my ancestry,” Jackson said during a rally in Bar Harbor in June. “But because of the exchange rate, their national health care and subsidized equipment, they’ve always been able to work for less in the industry and we’ve always been pitted against each other because of that, which is a tragedy.”

Compare that with a 2017 statement from the federation: “Pitting worker against worker is an age-old tactic of the boss.”

“The only way to stop the race to the bottom . . . is for working people of all immigration statuses to stand together,” the AFL-CIO said at the time.

And, like the AFL-CIO, Jackson has remained opposed to guest-worker programs, while supporting measures to allow refugees and asylum seekers to work.

Jackson and the AFL-CIO have argued the guest-worker programs create an exploitable workforce tied to employers. The AFL-CIO has said the programs “pose a real threat” because they create disposable labor controlled by employers, while Jackson’s campaign says his focus remains on ensuring employers aren’t using guest-worker programs to suppress wages, evade labor standards, or unlawfully displace workers.

Twenty years ago, Jackson was the primary sponsor of a bill that would have barred the state Department of Labor from certifying to the federal DOL that no U.S. citizen was qualified for a job opening in the forestry field for the purpose of allowing an employer to hire someone under an H-2B visa if the job would require the worker to use their own equipment and no prevailing wage was set for forestry workers using their own equipment. The state house failed to take up the proposal.

In September 2020, as the Maine Senate president, Jackson filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Labor alleging that federal officials were failing to enforce immigration law against Canadian workers in Maine’s logging industry. He argued that the visa holders were depressing Maine truckers’ wages and taking work from Americans.

But in nearly all other areas, Jackson has taken a much more liberal approach to immigration.

Jackson supported LD 1050, a bipartisan resolution directing the Maine Department of Labor to request a federal waiver allowing presumptive work eligibility for asylum seekers.

And while he ultimately finished third in the gubernatorial primary, his campaign platform included support for abolishing ICE and argued the state government should “protect [working Mainers] from Donald Trump and ICE.”

He sent a campaign email in response to reports of ICE activity in the state that said, “ICE should stay the hell away from Maine,” and he later suggested in a post on Instagram, “This rogue agency must be abolished.”

In June, he said ICE had become “a violent, lawless force that terrorizes communities and operates without meaningful accountability” after agents fatally shot a Colombian man in Biddeford, Maine, who they said was attempting to flee from an address where agents had been directed to serve a final removal order.

ICE “should be abolished,” Jackson argued. “Immigration services should be handled by a humane, civilian agency that respects due process and keeps families together; serious cross-border crime can be investigated by accountable federal law enforcement. We need comprehensive immigration reform — not masked raids, detention quotas and fear.”

He also responded to a candidate questionnaire from Maine Public by answering yes when asked whether “an immigrant workforce is essential for Maine’s economy.”

Reached for comment by National Review, Jackson’s campaign summed up his position on immigration by saying, “Ever since leading the 1998 logging blockade, Troy has always stood with Mainers against big corporations who use guest-worker laws to abuse and screw over workers. He opposes ICE and its cruel tactics that have led to the death of a man in Maine, unlike Susan Collins who caved to Donald Trump and gave ICE a blank $70 billion check without any guardrails to keep Mainers safe.”

Collins, for her part, responded to the shooting death in Biddeford by calling on DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin to “cease all non-urgent vehicle stops.”

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