Sometimes the political gods have a sense of humor. Senator Jon Ossoff — the Georgia Democrat who voted against the Laken Riley Act — now has to face off against Rep. Mike Collins, the man who actually authored the bill, in the 2026 Georgia Senate race. Collins won the Republican primary runoff on June 16 with 55 percent of the vote. President Trump endorsed him. This race is now the clearest contrast election in America.
The man who voted against the bill versus the man who wrote it. In the state where Laken Riley was murdered.
Laken Riley was 22 years old, a nursing student at Augusta University, when she went for a morning run on the University of Georgia campus on February 22, 2024. She never came back. Jose Antonio Ibarra — an illegal alien who had entered the country across the southern border and remained free in the community despite prior encounters with law enforcement — abducted her from the trail, dragged her 65 feet into the woods, raped her and beat her to death.
She didn't go quietly. The data from her fitness watch told the story prosecutors brought into the courtroom. At 9:10 a.m., her pace slowed — the moment her run became something else. She was on the trail with her attacker for approximately four minutes before being dragged into the woods. At 9:28 a.m., her heart rate dropped to zero. Eighteen minutes. Ibarra's DNA was found beneath her fingernails. She fought him, hard, until she couldn't anymore.
Ibarra was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole. He had never spent a single day in this country legally.
Rep. Mike Collins took that grief and turned it into law. The Laken Riley Act — which requires the detention of illegal aliens charged with theft, burglary, violent crimes, or assault on law enforcement — passed and was signed by President Trump. Collins wrote it. He pushed it. He delivered it.
And Senator Jon Ossoff voted against it.
Not only did Ossoff vote against the law named after a girl murdered viciously in his own state, but as the National Republican Senatorial Committee noted, he then attacked ICE — the agency responsible for removing criminal illegal aliens from American communities — as a "force of masked federal police." He voted against protecting Georgians. Then he attacked the people doing the protecting.
Collins isn't letting him forget it. "If Jon Ossoff wanted to help pass the Laken Riley Act, he could've stepped up at any moment. He didn't lift a finger to protect Georgians. I delivered," Collins said.
Ossoff did eventually cast a vote for the Laken Riley Act — but only after its passage was already guaranteed. His vote didn't change the outcome. It didn't protect anyone. It was a calculation made when the political cost of opposition had become too high and the vote no longer mattered. Georgia voters can read a calendar.
Ossoff is the only Democratic senator running for re-election in a state Donald Trump carried in 2024. This is a very winnable seat for Republicans, a chance to further expand the Republican majority in the Senate. And at every campaign stop, every debate, and every door knock between now and November, one question follows him: Why did Jon Ossoff vote against the Laken Riley Act when it counted?
He can point to his later vote. He can invoke procedural objections. But he cannot explain what changed between the vote that mattered and the vote that didn't — because the only honest answer is that public opinion changed, and Ossoff followed it.
Mike Collins wrote a law named after a 22-year-old woman who fought for her life for eighteen minutes in the Georgia woods and didn't make it home. His opponent voted against it when it counted.
That's the race.
