Representative Mike Collins, a Trump-aligned immigration hard-liner who has drawn headlines with provocative social-media posts, is one of three top candidates in the Republican primary for Senate in Georgia on Tuesday.
Here are five things to know about Mr. Collins, 58, a second-term congressman from rural central Georgia.
1. He is running as a loyalist of President Trump. Like the two other top candidates in the Republican race, Mr. Collins has cast himself as an ally of the president, who has not endorsed a candidate in the race. Mr. Collins has some unique ties to the president: The first bill Mr. Trump signed after returning to office was a bill sponsored by Mr. Collins. The measure, the Laken Riley Act, targeted undocumented immigrants charged with nonviolent crimes for deportation. Mr. Collins’s campaign website describes him as “constant” at Trump rallies.
2. His hard-line immigration views are at the heart of his campaign. Mr. Collins has pointed to the Laken Riley Act and his broader positions on immigration during his run for Senate. That bill is named for a 22-year-old Georgia nursing student who was killed in 2024 by a migrant from Venezuela who crossed into the United States illegally. Her family has endorsed Mr. Collins, as has the union representing border agents. After Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington directly urged Mr. Trump in 2025 to display mercy on behalf of immigrants, Mr. Collins wrote on social media that she “should be added to the deportation list.”
3. He built a trucking company. Mr. Collins and his wife, Leigh Ann, started a trucking company in the 1990s. The company, Collins Trucking, based about 40 miles southeast of Atlanta in Jackson, Ga., hauls freight across the Midwest and Southeast. It has more than 100 employees, according to his campaign. Mr. Collins has leaned into his trucking past as he runs for the Senate. In a video launching his campaign, he said, “It’s time to send a trucker to the U.S. Senate” to put Georgians “back in the driver’s seat.”
4. He has a history of incendiary social-media posts. Mr. Collins, who posts frequently on social media, once responded to videos of white, male University of Mississippi students taunting and jeering at a female Black student at a pro-Palestinian protest by writing, “Ole Miss taking care of business.” (He later issued a lengthy statement saying that if anyone had treated someone “improperly because of their race, they should be punished appropriately.”) And after the assassination attempt against Mr. Trump at a campaign event in Butler, Pa., 2024, Mr. Collins wrote on social media that “Joe Biden sent the orders” and urged a local prosecutor to bring charges against the Democratic president. After the post, the conservative editorial board of The Wall Street Journal described Mr. Collins as “the village idiot.”
5. He faces an ethics probe: The House Ethics Committee is looking into allegations that Mr. Collins’s office paid a district office intern who had a romantic relationship with the congressman’s chief of staff but did not actually work in the office. Mr. Collins said in a primary debate that the inquiry was based on a “bogus claim” filed anonymously. “Anybody can file a complaint,” he said.
