In the Ohio Senate race, a Republican ad blames former Sen. Sherrod Brown for a deadly crash in April on an Ohio interstate in which an immigrant was charged with vehicular homicide. But there’s no evidence of any tie between Brown’s votes on immigration, as the ad suggests, and the suspect in this incident.
“Because of him, Ohioans paid the price,” the ad, from the National Republican Senatorial Committee, claims, referring to Brown, who was elected to the U.S. House in 1993 and then served in the Senate from 2007 to 2025. Brown is challenging Republican Sen. Jon Husted in the toss-up race.
We’ve seen campaign ads in the past trying to tie a deadly incident to the policies of a politician. But the links can be tenuous, at best, as is the case here. Most of the votes the NRSC cites didn’t make a difference in terms of whether legislation was ultimately enacted, and it’s hard to know how the bills would’ve affected this particular case.
The NRSC ad began airing this month, mostly through streaming TVs or devices, according to the ad-tracking service AdImpact. The spot begins by saying, “Sherrod Brown opened our borders to dangerous illegals,” and then shows an image of a border wall along with images of Brown and former President Joe Biden as the announcer says, “The consequences were deadly.”
That leaves the impression that something Biden and Brown did allowed a dangerous person to enter the country. But the case the ad goes on to discuss involves an immigrant who entered the country sometime in the 1990s, according to the Ohio Department of Public Safety, and it’s unclear how or where he came into the country. The man – Modou Ngom – later used different names to obtain a driver’s license and then citizenship, the Ohio DPS said.
An investigation by Ohio authorities found that it “appears” Ngom “used multiple names and dates of birth to obtain state and federal identification,” according to an April 23 statement by the director of the Ohio DPS. Ngom got his Ohio driver’s license around 2003, his commercial driver’s license in 2007, “under an alternate identity,” and his citizenship in the mid-2010s, “under that same alternate identity,” the statement said. “State records show he changed his name back to Modou Ngom in 2015.”
The Ohio DPS said it gave its information about Ngom to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno, a Republican, sent an April 28 letter to the secretaries of the departments of Transportation and Homeland Security, asking them to investigate. Moreno posed several questions, including, “When, through what port of entry, and under what justification did Ngom enter the United States?” and “Did Ngom use fraudulent immigration documents in the process of obtaining state and federal identification?” We reached out to DHS to ask if it could provide any additional information about Ngom, but we haven’t yet received a response.
The NRSC ad shows a snippet of a TV news broadcast about the April 11 deadly crash in Delaware County, Ohio, for which Ngom has been charged with multiple counts of aggravated vehicular homicide and vehicular assault. The semi-truck he was driving hit a car from behind, leading to a multi-car crash, with some vehicles catching on fire. A family of three was killed: “37-year-old Luke Soposki, 36-year-old Lynnea Soposki, and their 1-year-old child,” as the news clip in the ad says.
The ad pins the blame for the tragedy squarely on Brown, ending with the line, “Because of him, Ohioans paid the price.”
What does the former senator have to do with it? An NRSC spokesperson told us the Republican committee was tying Brown to Ngom through Brown’s votes on immigration legislation, claiming Brown voted for “open border policies” and “to protect illegal aliens like Ngom from deportation.”
For any legislation to have had an impact on Ngom entering the country, it would’ve had to be enacted before he reportedly came to the U.S. sometime in the 1990s. The NRSC cites one vote by Brown in the 1990s against a 1996 immigration bill — legislation that then President Bill Clinton signed into law a few days later. The legislation — which aimed to crack down on illegal immigration by, among other measures, increasing the number of Border Patrol agents, constructing border fencing and expediting deportations — was rolled into an omnibus appropriations bill that Brown voted in favor of.
So, Brown’s initial vote against the immigration bill made no difference in terms of what became law. It’s also difficult to say how passing or not passing the legislation would’ve had an impact on Ngom, given we have scant details about him and his immigration to the U.S.
Many Democrats opposed the 1996 immigration bill and proposed their own version, which Brown supported and which failed. News coverage at the time said that some of the opposition from Democrats and initially the White House concerned provisions regarding legal immigrants, including one that would have blocked medical care for legal immigrants who had AIDS and another “that would have barred legal immigrants who were poor enough to qualify for food stamps from acting as sponsors to other newcomers,” a Sept. 29, 1996, New York Times article said. Republicans agreed to drop those elements from the final appropriations bill.
The NRSC points to other votes by Brown as detailed in a May Fox News article. But several of those votes also didn’t matter in the end in terms of what was enacted into law, or not. For instance, Brown co-sponsored a 2019 bill to repeal a 2017 executive order by President Donald Trump to prioritize removing immigrants in the country illegally who had been charged with or convicted of crimes, or committed fraud, and to withhold federal grants from so-called “sanctuary” jurisdictions if local officials don’t cooperate with federal immigration officials. The bill died, never getting a vote in Congress.
Another item cited in the Fox News article is Brown’s vote against a 2021 amendment to a congressional budget resolution. A budget resolution doesn’t become law, but serves as a guide for the fiscal year budget and spending and revenue levels for a period of time. The amendment said Congress could revise allocations to make sure ICE has resources “to detain and deport a higher number of illegal aliens who have been convicted of a criminal offense” as long as the changes didn’t increase the deficit. But the amendment passed anyway, and it’s unclear if it would even pertain to Ngom, who at that point reportedly was a citizen. It’s also not clear if he had been convicted of any crimes.
In a 2001 vote listed in the Fox News article cited by the NRSC, Brown supported an amendment that failed. The Democratic sponsor of the amendment described it as ensuring “due process” for some immigrants, per a Supreme Court ruling at the time. The measure sought to halt the deportation of immigrants under certain legal conditions, such as for those with plea agreements in place before the 1996 immigration law took effect or for those without final orders of removal. But, again, the amendment failed.
Other votes highlighted in the Fox News article concern Brown’s opposition to Trump’s border wall. But of course those came long after Ngom reportedly entered the country and even after Ngom reportedly obtained citizenship.
The NRSC certainly disagrees with Brown’s votes and his positions on immigration, and that’s a matter of opinion. We take no position on that. But none of the votes it cites indicates a connection to Ngom, as its ad contends.
When we asked the Brown campaign about the ad, it responded that the former senator had worked “to secure the southern border,” pointing to his yes vote for a 2024 border security bill that was endorsed by the labor union for Border Patrol agents. The president of that group described the bill as “not perfect” but “a step in the right direction.” The bill failed. Brown also co-sponsored a 2023 Democratic border security appropriations bill, which also failed to advance.
The campaign further cited Brown being an original co-sponsor of the bipartisan FEND Off Fentanyl Act, which became law in 2024 and sought to stem fentanyl trafficking by cartels, among other measures.
The Brown campaign pointed to the candidate’s recent remarks on immigration to a Youngstown, Ohio, TV news station in April. “I support closing the border to people that, so they just can’t cross the border at will,” Brown said, prompting criticism from Republicans of his legislative history as detailed in the May Fox News article. “We of course should be deporting people that have committed a crime,” Brown continued. “But we’ve also seen these mass arrests and deportations that are disrupting families who are here working every day paying taxes, paying into Social Security, paying into Medicare. Those are the kinds of people that I want to see in this country who are doing the work they ought to do.”
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