Georgia Congressman Mike Collins Blames Foreign Truckers for Road Safety Amid Family Business Safety Concerns

Rep. Mike Collins, a Georgia Republican running for a U.S. Senate seat, has vowed to improve road safety by revoking commercial driver’s licenses from noncitizens. However, an analysis of federal motor vehicle data shows that Collins’ own family trucking business has a higher rate of speeding and unsafe driving violations per mile than the majority of similar companies.

Collins, who serves on the U.S. House of Representatives’ transportation committee and owns a trucking business, has been a prominent supporter of the Trump administration’s efforts to revoke licenses from nearly 200,000 noncitizen commercial drivers. In an April Facebook post, Collins wrote, If you can’t read English road signs, you don’t belong behind the wheel. Period.

The Trump administration enacted a rule in March 2026 that could lead to the revocation of these licenses. Despite this, the administration’s own initial analysis from the previous year stated there was not sufficient evidence from rigorous quantitative analyses to demonstrate a measurable empirical relationship between a driver’s citizenship status and safety outcomes.

Democratic state attorneys general further challenged the rule in a letter, noting that the Trump administration cited only five fatal crashes caused by noncitizens with commercial driver’s licenses out of more than 4,000 deaths involving such drivers nationwide. The letter stated the rule provided no facts to support the claim that revoking thousands of licenses would benefit public safety.

Safety Record of Collins’ Trucking Business

ProPublica analyzed Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration data from March 27, 2024, to March 26, 2026, to examine the safety record of the Collins family business. The company reported approximately 7 million miles driven in 2025.

During the two-year period analyzed, the business recorded 31 unsafe driving violations, including 11 speeding violations, and four crashes that resulted in six injuries. When compared to approximately 21,000 other active trucking companies with more than 1 million annual miles, the Collins business’s per-mile rates for injuries, unsafe driving, and speeding were higher than those of roughly 80% of other companies.

While the company’s recent crash rate was around the median of similar companies, its rate of injury from those crashes was in the top fifth. Since 2001, the fleet has been involved in more than 90 crashes, resulting in at least 51 injuries and five deaths.

Specific incidents include a 2007 crash in North Carolina where a Collins trucker veered into oncoming traffic, killing both the trucker and the driver of another vehicle, Bridget Murphy. According to a 2009 court filing, the company’s liability insurance paid $1 million to Murphy’s estate and passengers. In 2021, another trucker collided with a car in Indiana, leading to a lawsuit from driver Larkin Cooper, who claimed the crash forced her to leave nursing school.

In 2023, a trucker failed to stop for a red light in northeast Georgia, causing a four-vehicle crash. One victim claimed medical costs for back, knee, and neck treatments exceeded $120,000. Lawyers for the business denied wrongdoing in the Indiana and Georgia cases, and the suits were later settled for undisclosed sums.

Opposition to Safety Technologies

While Collins describes his focus on noncitizen drivers as a safety issue, he has opposed other safety mandates that experts say reduce serious crashes. These include speed limiters and automatic emergency braking (AEB) systems.

In late 2023, the Biden administration proposed a rule requiring devices to cap truck speeds as low as 60 miles per hour. During a transportation committee hearing, Collins questioned the necessity of the rule, arguing that insurance companies and speed limit signs already served as sufficient deterrents.

They are called speed limit signs. They are enforced by law enforcement.

Rep. Mike Collins

Collins’ position contradicted the American Trucking Associations (ATA), the industry’s largest trade group and a organization to which the Collins family business belongs. The ATA had expressed support for capping truck speeds between 65 and 70 miles per hour. The Trump administration eventually withdrew the speed limiter proposal in 2025.

Collins also pushed back against a mandate for automatic emergency braking systems, which can force a truck to slow down to avoid a collision. Federal officials estimated such a mandate could prevent more than 8,000 injuries annually. At a congressional hearing last year, Collins argued the technology was expensive and claimed that these systems were actually hurting more than helping.

Zach Cahalan, executive director of the Truck Safety Coalition, told ProPublica that these are proven technologies that protect people on the roads from horrific tragedy.

Neither Rep. Collins’ congressional office nor his campaign responded to requests for comment regarding his business’s safety record or his policy positions on trucking safety. His campaign manager declined to make him available for an interview.