A Georgia congressman running for one of the most competitive U.S. Senate seats in the country has pledged in social media posts and interviews to make America’s roads safer — by taking away commercial driver’s licenses from non-citizens.
“If you can’t read road signs in English,” Mike Collins, a Republican, job on Facebook in April, “You have no place behind the wheel. Period.”
Collins, a trucking company owner and member of the U.S. House Transportation Committee, is one of the strongest advocates of the Trump administration’s effort to revoke the licenses of nearly 200,000 non-citizen commercial drivers, including thousands of truckers. The Trump administration has pushed forward with this policy even though its own officials have written that there is no empirical evidence to show that foreign truckers cause more accidents than U.S. citizen truckers.
At the same time, however, Collins opposed rules that experts say would actually reduce the chance of serious accidents. Those rules could have required Collins’ family business to invest substantial sums in new safety measures for its fleet.
Over the past 25 years, crashes involving truckers for the Collins company have killed five people and injured more than 50 people — including a woman who now requires 24-hour care because of a severe brain injury — according to federal data, court records, plaintiffs’ attorneys and police records.
Drivers and passengers who were injured in those crashes later claimed in lawsuits that Collins’ company truckers caused them to collectively incur hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills. The amount paid by the company is not known because the settlements reached with accident victims were confidential, as is often the case in such lawsuits. Court filings in the lawsuit indicate both sides agreed to a $1 million payment from the company’s insurer. The Collins company has denied wrongdoing by the truckers and the company itself in these cases.
ProPublica’s analysis of federal motor vehicle data from the past two years shows that Collins’ company has a higher rate of dangerous driving and speeding violations per mile than the majority of trucking companies with high mileage. The analysis also shows that the company’s recent accident rate is around the median for similar companies, while the injury rate from these accidents is in the top fifth.
Safety experts told ProPublica that some of the technologies opposed by Collins, including devices on tractor-trailers to limit their speed and sensors on large vehicles to automatically brake in the face of a potential collision, reduce the chances of crashes resulting in serious injuries and deaths. The nation’s largest trucking trade group — a group of which the Collins family business is a member, according to the company’s website — has supported mandates for these technologies.
“These are proven technologies,” said Zach Cahalan, executive director of the Truck Safety Coalition, which advocates on behalf of crash victims and their families. He added that the technologies would “protect those we care about on our roads from horrible tragedies”.
Neither Collins’ campaign nor his congressional office responded to ProPublica’s requests for comment or questions about his family business’s safety record or his policy positions on truck safety. His campaign manager declined to make him available for an interview. The company did not respond to questions sent by ProPublica; an employee told ProPublica that press inquiries about the company were handled by Collins’ congressional office.
In recent years, Collins has described his efforts to keep foreign truckers off the roads as “purely a matter of safety.” He also questioned the effectiveness of other safety measures and said they would have imposed additional costs on his industry.
“We want to be safe,” Collins said during a congressional hearing. “I don’t know any trucking company that doesn’t want to be safe. And when they’re not, they’re taken off the road.”
Late in 2023, his first year in Congress, Collins had one of his first opportunities to support a measure that experts say could make roads safer. The Biden administration had proposed a rule that require the installation of devices to limit the speed of truckscapping it at 60 miles per hour.
But Collins questioned the need for the rule. He told officials at a transportation committee hearing, the federal government should not require this security measure. He said insurance companies already provide a sufficient deterrent to speeding because they have the ability to remove coverage for truckers with dangerous driving histories. He also said the rule was unnecessary because of another deterrent that has long been in place.
“They’re called speed limit signs,” he explained. “They are enforced by law enforcement.”
Collins’ position was at odds with that of the industry’s largest trade group, the American Trucking Associations, which had expressed support that year for capping truck speeds between 65 and 70 miles per hour. Collins did not respond to questions about why his views are at odds with the ATA, which represents the interests of 37,000 members, including Collins’ family business.
In 2025, the Trump administration withdrew the speed limiter proposal. US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy celebrated the decision like one that would get “DC bureaucrats out of your trucks.”
Collins also opposed a different proposal, which would have required trucks to be equipped with automatic emergency braking systems. This technology can force a truck to slow down if a risk of collision is detected.
Federal officials had estimated that mandating the braking system could prevent more than 8,000 injuries a year. ATA also supported much of the proposal. Yet Collins, whose family business has used these systems in some trucks, explained in recent congressional hearings that the technology was “very expensive” And it didn’t work very well. “People don’t understand that these things hurt more than they help right now,” Collins said at a hearing last year.
Some Collins truckers have been involved in accidents due to their alleged inability to slow down, according to citations and police reports obtained by ProPublica. Over the past five years, three people injured in these accidents have sued Collins’ fleet because its truckers allegedly failed to maintain a safe distance, leading them to cause accidents. The plaintiffs claimed they suffered serious injuries that cost between five and six figures in medical bills.
Both the truckers and Collins’ company have denied wrongdoing in the cases. The three files were closed without further action. Lawyers for two plaintiffs said the cases settled; the third plaintiff’s lawyer did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the dismissal of the case.
The fate of the automatic emergency braking requirements is now also up in the air. The Trump administration delayed the rule taking effect and, according to ProPublica’s report from last yearmay restrict its scope.
Collins said his decades in the industry make him particularly sensitive to safety measures that work, compared to bureaucrats who have “beat the crap out of” his industry with too many regulations. In the late 1980s, Collins became the head of the family trucking company before graduating from college. He succeeded his father, Mac Collins, who served as a member of Congress from 1993 to 2005.
Shortly after Mike Collins was president, one of his company’s truckers lost control of his trailer. The accident that followed sent a 19-year-old woman to the hospital. The trucker later pleaded guilty to driving under the influence of cocaine. The company came under scrutiny because that trucker pleaded no contest to drunken driving earlier that year but was allowed to remain on the road. A political opponent then aired a television advertisement according to which accused the family’s trucking company to be cited for “more than a hundred security violations.
At the time, Mac Collins blamed the company’s insurer for missing the drunk driving conviction during a background check. He said the ad contained “lies,” but did not say what was wrong. The company ultimately fired the trucker after the accident, Mac Collins told the Ledger-Enquirer in 1994.
The more the Collins truck fleet grew — becoming one of about 100 trucks hauling lumber for Georgia-Pacific as well as tires and steel — the more traffic tickets and inspection violations its truckers received. Data reviewed by ProPublica showed that truckers have been involved in more than 90 crashes that left at least 51 injured and five dead since 2001.
In 2007, a Collins trucker veered into oncoming traffic on a North Carolina highway and struck a white Honda CR-V. The driver of the CR-V, Bridget Murphy, and the truck driver both died. Murphy’s estate and two of Murphy’s passengers filed a lawsuit and, according to a 2009 court filingaccepted a $1 million payment from the company’s liability insurance coverage. The company wrote in a filing that the trucker had been “struck by a physical deficiency beyond his control.”
In 2021, another trucker changed lanes on an Indiana highway and collided with a car driven by Larkin Cooper. She claimed in a lawsuit that the trucker “careless and reckless” Lake Driving injuries caused injuries that forced her to drop out of nursing school and pursue a lower-paying career. His lawyer wrote that the total damages were likely to exceed $75,000.
In 2023, a trucker failed to stop quickly enough while approaching a red light on a northeast Georgia highway, causing a four-vehicle crash, according to court records. The drivers of two vehicles later testified in court proceedings that they suffered serious medical injuries. One said the costs to treat his back, knee and neck totaled more than $120,000.
Collins did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the lawsuits. Lawyers for the family business have denied any wrongdoing in lawsuits filed in Indiana and Georgia. Shortly thereafter, the company settled for undisclosed sums.
During a televised debate in April, just weeks before the May 19 Republican primary for the U.S. Senate race, Collins told viewers that his experience in the trucking industry taught him how to work across the aisle in Washington, DC. His political ads show him driving a rig and his street signs feature a logo of an American flag shaped like a tractor-trailer.
Yet his message of making roads safer focuses on one main idea: getting non-citizen truckers off the road.
In one social video beginning in November, Collins was on one side of a split screen, speaking to a panel on the other screen.
“Do you know what this sign says? » asked Collins. “No, me neither.”
“Y’all, this is a road sign from Uzbekistan, this is exactly why I can drive a truck in Georgia, but not in Uzbekistan,” he continued. “But somehow that common sense, well, it didn’t apply to just one man on our roads.”
Collins then replaced a photo of the sign with a photo of an undocumented trucker named Akhror Bozorov. Collins said he was “wanted in Uzbekistan on charges of terrorism and spreading Jihad.” After Bozorov was arrested last year, the Department of Homeland Security released a press release who criticized Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s Department of Transportation for issuing a license to Bozorov and President Joe Biden’s administration for granting the trucker his work authorization.
Collins went further and used the trucker’s story to attack the politician he is trying to unseat, U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, for not being tough enough on immigration.
He also cited Bozorov’s story to justify stripping non-citizen truckers of their licenses – but failed to present evidence that non-citizen truckers make the roads less safe.
In March, the Trump administration adopted a rule that could potentially revoke the commercial licenses of nearly 200,000 non-citizen drivers. But according to the administration’s initial analysis of its own rule last year, “There is insufficient evidence, derived from well-designed and rigorous quantitative analyses, to reliably demonstrate a measurable empirical relationship.» between a trucker’s citizenship status and safety outcomes.
A letter from nearly 20 Democratic attorneys general underlines that the Trump administration cited only five fatal crashes last year caused by non-citizens with commercial driver’s licenses, out of more than 4,000 deaths involving CDL drivers nationwide. The letter said the Trump administration’s rule presented “no facts” to support the claim that revoking thousands of licenses would “benefit public safety.”
Public interest lawyers also filed a legal challenge to the rule. The challenge is ongoing.
“The idea that immigrant drivers are less safe than other drivers is not supported by the facts,” said Wendy Liu, one of the lawyers who filed the suit.
The same week the Trump rule was signed into law, Collins doubled down on calls to restrict business licenses for noncitizens, writing in an Instagram post that “this is not a game. Lives are at stake. Kick these thugs out now.”
