There’s no evidence Sherrod Brown’s immigration votes caused a fatal Ohio crash

Months after an Ohio family of three died in a highway crash, their case took a starring role in a political ad criticizing Democrat Sherrod Brown in his campaign to unseat Republican Sen. John Husted. 

“Sherrod Brown opened our borders to dangerous illegals,” the narrator in the National Republican Senatorial Committee ad said as video footage from a highway crash scene rolled. “The consequences were deadly.”

A photo of Lynnea and Luke Soposki and their 1-year-old son, Logan, flashed on the screen. The three died north of Columbus on Interstate 71 on April 11 after a semitruck crashed into stopped traffic, causing a chain reaction that injured others, according to police.

The semitruck driver, 50-year-old Modou Ngom, was charged with three counts of aggravated vehicular manslaughter and four counts of vehicular assault. Federal prosecutors have also accused Ngom of fraudulently obtaining U.S. citizenship and an Ohio driver’s license.

The Soposkis’ relatives requested the ad be removed, objecting to the case’s politicization and saying family members had not been consulted before the photo was used. Husted sought to distance himself from the ad after the family complained, calling it the work of “some third-party group.” The ad ran widely across Ohio, according to The New York Times. It is still on the NRSC’s YouTube channel.

So, what did Brown have to do with this crash? The ad said that “Ohioans paid the price” because of Brown. It showed a picture of Brown alongside former President Joe Biden and video of fencing at the southern U.S. border.

The U.S. under Biden did not have an open border policy. Then, as now, the U.S. employs physical barriers, surveillance technology and Border Patrol agents to limit entry through the southern border, even as some people entered the country undetected. 

And although Brown served in the U.S. Senate for three terms and represented the state in the House before that, PolitiFact found no factual connection between Brown’s immigration votes and the circumstances of this crash.

Looking into Ngom’s citizenship status

About two weeks after the crash, the Ohio Department of Public Safety said that Ngom first entered the U.S. in the 1990s and “subsequently used multiple names and dates of birth to obtain state and federal identification.”

He “fraudulently obtained” an Ohio driver’s license around 2003 and a commercial driver’s license in 2007 “under an alternate identity,” the department said in a statement. Using that alternate identity, it said, Ngom was naturalized as a citizen in the mid-2010s before changing his name back to Modou Ngom in 2015.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told PolitiFact by email that Ngom was naturalized in 2015; the spokesperson did not confirm what year Ngom entered the country. We asked Ngom’s attorney, Jeffery M. Poth, for comment, but did not receive a response. Without more information, it’s impossible to know whether Brown was serving in Congress at the time of Ngom’s arrival. 

Brown was first sworn into Congress in 1993. His voting record over the next 30 years shows he supported expanding protections for some immigrants and opposed several Republican-backed immigration enforcement measures.

In 1996, for instance, Brown voted against a Republican-backed bill seeking to hire more Border Patrol agents, expedite deportations, and increase penalties for human smuggling and document fraud. A few days later, Congress included those immigration provisions in a larger government spending bill that Brown voted in favor of and then-President Bill Clinton signed into law.  

Unpacking Brown’s overall voting record

PolitiFact asked the NRSC to identify any of Brown’s votes or policies that it believes contributed to the incident referenced in the advertisement.

An NRSC spokesperson pointed to Brown’s overall immigration voting record, including votes highlighted in a May 3 Fox News article. He was in Congress from 1993 until 2025, after he lost his reelection campaign to Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno. 

The earliest vote mentioned in the Fox News story involved Brown’s support for a 2001 amendment that would have limited deportation in certain cases; the amendment applied to a specific group of immigrants with pre-1997 criminal plea agreements. But the measure failed; it could not have affected Ngom’s entry or case. Many of the other votes Fox News cited similarly failed or had no impact on federal law.  

Brown co-sponsored the 2019 End Mass Deportation Act, which would have rescinded President Donald Trump’s executive order that expanded deportation priorities and allowed the federal government to withhold funding from sanctuary cities, jurisdictions that generally limit their cooperation with federal immigration authorities. The bill did not advance out of committee and never became law.

In 2021, Brown voted against an amendment that would have shifted $300 million from a COVID-19 emergency leave fund for federal employees to Customs and Border Protection drug detection technology.

Brown also voted against a Republican-backed amendment that year that sought to prevent the cancellation of existing border wall contracts. The measure largely split along party lines, with most Democrats favoring the contract’s cancellation. In 2023, Brown voted against a Republican-backed amendment to continue or restart construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall. 

His voting record is more nuanced than the NRSC’s ad suggests. Although Brown supported measures expanding protections and legal pathways for some immigrants, he also backed bipartisan legislation aimed at strengthening border security.

In 2023, Brown worked with Republicans to try to pass the FEND Off Fentanyl Act, which would have imposed new sanctions and anti-money laundering measures targeting fentanyl traffickers.   He also supported a 2024 bill that would have provided nearly $7 billion for Customs and Border Protection, cosponsoring the Border Management, Security, and Assistance Act of 2023, which aimed to strengthen penalties for smugglers and drug traffickers, and support the recruitment and retention of border law enforcement officers. Neither bill became law. 

Our ruling

An NRSC ad said an Ohio crash that killed a family of three in April happened because “Sherrod Brown opened our borders to dangerous illegals.”

The semitruck driver whose actions police say caused the accident came to the U.S. in the 1990s, according to state officials, and fraudulently obtained driver’s licenses in 2003 and 2007. He became a naturalized citizen in 2015, a federal immigration official said. 

Without DHS confirmation about when he entered the U.S., we don’t know whether Brown was serving in Congress at the time. But Brown’s congressional record doesn’t show that his votes opened the U.S. borders or led to the crash.

We rate this claim False.