Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), who won an early 2021 runoff election after President Donald Trump lost his state in the previous November’s election, is up for reelection this year. He’s considered one of the most vulnerable Senate Democrats up in the 2026 election cycle, though he’s likely feeling fortunate that popular Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) decided to pass on the race. The incumbent has shown few signs of moderation, even in a purplish-red state, and has been rewarded by the progressive base. His campaign has been showered with financial donations, allowing Ossoff to enter what will be a bruising and expensive election year with a substantial $25 million war chest.
Ossoff, like many national Democrats, has been outspoken about recent events in Minneapolis. He has focused, unsurprisingly, on criticisms of federal law enforcement, with little to no apparent interest in condemning the roving mobs of organized agitators who have been criminally interfering in lawful federal operations. He has denounced the operations themselves, which are carrying out federal laws passed by the body in which he serves, as a manifestation of “wickedness.” In the same partisan sermon, he described immigration enforcement in the most demagogic of terms, asking how “masked federal agents” can be permitted to “set up checkpoints in American cities, demand papers, rip people from their cars … kill?” Ossoff shared multiple videos of these clips on his X account.
Following last weekend’s deadly events, Ossoff posted several more times, asking, “Will one, even ONE, Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Georgia join other GOP leaders who are calling for a full, transparent, independent investigation into Alex Pretti’s killing in Minnesota?” I happen to agree that a full and independent investigation is warranted, though I do not trust Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), Attorney General Keith Ellison, or Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey to conduct such an investigation. Meanwhile, congressional Democrats are mulling a government shutdown over funding for the Department of Homeland Security, despite the fact that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is fully funded for the next three years. Among their reported would-be hostage-taking demands is a poison pill that requires judicial warrants for all ICE arrests in order to agree to funding a DHS apparatus that includes the Federal Emergency Management Agency and airport security. Fox News’s Bill Melugin explained how such a requirement would “take a massive amount of targets off the board for ICE. They would only be able to go after illegal immigrants who have committed a new *federal* crime *after* entering the U.S. illegally. State and local crimes would not apply.”
This is a dangerous and insane policy position that would cripple immigration officials’ ability to enforce immigration laws by adding yet another layer of bureaucratic red tape, while letting untold numbers of criminal illegal immigrants off the hook. Will Ossoff stand up to his party on this in right-leaning Georgia, or will he vote the Biden-Harris-Schumer-AOC line, as he virtually always does? Beyond policy, it’s also notable what has been absent from Ossoff’s social media feed. He has signaled hard to his donor and activist base, assuring them that their priorities are his. What he evidently has no appetite to signal about are heinous crimes, such as the ones allegedly committed by an illegal immigrant in Georgia in mid-January.
According to DHS, the suspect, a Mexican national unlawfully present in the United States, “forcibly broke into a back door of a family’s home on Jan. 12, 2025, and proceeded to rape an 11-year-old girl and held her 10-year-old sister at knifepoint.” This individual, who has no right to be in our country at all, now stands charged with “rape, statutory rape, aggravated child molestation, aggravated sodomy, cruelty toward children, home invasion, false imprisonment, burglary, aggravated assault with a knife.” He was previously arrested by local law enforcement and committed a prior felony by reentering the U.S. illegally for at least the second time, officials said. This happened in Ossoff’s state. While his X feed is chock full of commentary about events in a city that’s a 2 1/2 hour flight from Atlanta, Ossoff has posted nothing about the violation of these innocent little girls in his own backyard, allegedly by a man who personifies why ICE exists. No press release on this, either, even though Ossoff has posted several condemning federal law enforcement in recent weeks.
TIM WALZ’S DISINGENUOUS SANCTUARY SPIN
The Georgia senator is once again demonstrating his priorities. Conservative writer Greg Price searched the @ossoff feed for any mention of the term “Laken Riley.” The search yielded no results. “To this day, Jon Ossoff has never even so much as tweeted about Laken Riley,” Price noted, in reference to the young college student who was brutally murdered by a repeat criminal illegal immigrant in Ossoff’s state in 2024. The senator has posted and preached up a storm about Minneapolis, hewing to the left-wing narrative. But he clearly has far less interest, or finds far less political value, in addressing, let alone expressing the sort of outrage he has evinced about a controversy far away from Georgia, horrific crimes committed against his constituents. Those rapes and murders are not helpful to his partisan narrative and backward policies, you see, so they might as well not exist in Ossoff’s world.
Such crimes illustrate the urgent need for ICE’s work and the obvious righteousness of removing criminal immigrants from the U.S., in accordance with our laws. But they are not convenient to Ossoff’s political posturing or priorities, so he downplays or ignores them, even as he wraps himself in the self-righteous language of morality and decency. In doing so, does he speak for Georgians? Voters will have an opportunity to weigh in on that question in November.