The Trucking Crackdown Doesn't Go Far Enough

Trump is on the right road, but it’s going to take more to end dangerous trucking in America.

On May 19, 2026, a truck driven by a man named Manvir Singh slammed into stopped traffic on California Route 99 near Lodi, killing two young men aged 16 and 20, and sending five others in separate vehicles to the hospital. According to the Department of Homeland Security, Singh entered the United States illegally in 2023, and the issuance of his commercial driver’s license (CDL) by the state of California is under investigation.

A few weeks later, on June 10, a gentleman named Manmeet Singh, recently of Sacramento, was behind the wheel of an 18-wheeler hauling mail for the United States Postal Service when he crashed on Interstate 5 near the town of Willows, California. This Mr. Singh had no valid CDL, which means he may not have been trained whatsoever in how to operate his truck properly. It also turns out that Yaari Transport LLC, the trucking company he worked for, has a long history of operating shoddy equipment and, contrary to federal regulations, employing drivers who are illiterate in English.

If all of this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Truck crashes involving illegal immigrants, or those who were issued employment authorization documents in a suspicious manner by the Biden Administration, are now a regular feature of our news and social media commentary. What makes these two incidents noteworthy, however, is not the particular pattern of poorly trained and incompetent “drivers” we see repeated across so many crashes, but that these two took place nearly one year after the Trump Administration began to do something about them. They present a number of questions about how deep the problem is and whether the new enforcement measures are effective.

In April of 2025, President Trump issued an executive order restoring an old and relatively unknown regulation that had been waived in 2016 by the Obama Administration—requiring that America’s truckers be proficient in English. Since 1937, CFR 391.11 has stipulated that in order to hold a CDL, truckers “can read and speak the English language sufficiently to converse with the general public, to understand highway traffic signs and signals in the English language, to respond to official inquiries, and to make entries on reports and records.”

Trump’s EO was issued after a litany of crashes, which were accelerating in 2025. The same small cluster of factors was at play in each case—the driver was an illegal immigrant or had otherwise been suspiciously issued an EAD card, was given a CDL against federal regulations despite being illiterate in English, and was often working for a small company with a horrific safety record that avoided being shut down due to the chameleon-like shedding of registration numbers and moving of drivers and equipment between various layers of LLCs or other entities.

Public exasperation came to a head last August with the now-infamous “U-Turn” crash on the Florida Turnpike, where three people were killed by yet another illegal immigrant from India who was allowed to stay in America and issued a CDL against federal regulations. Dash cam video footage from that incident went viral, and the trucking industry occupied center stage in the news cycle for two solid weeks.

A year later, and after it has been confirmed that 30 innocent motorists were killed by these insourced truckers issued “non-domiciled” CDLs in 2025, we should be asking if English language proficiency (ELP) enforcement measures, amongst others, are up to the task of cleaning up the trucking industry, our highways, and our economy.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has been very responsive to issues brought forth by regular truckers like me. Over and above hosting numerous pressers to outline the results of various investigations, Duffy also made an appearance at the biggest trucker party in the country, the MidAmerica Trucking Show, where he fielded unscripted questions and comments from many a trucker.

One of the secretary’s oft-highlighted actions is the number of illegal or illiterate (often both) “truckers” placed “Out of Service” after being inspected by state-level DOT officers. Duffy’s most recent update suggests that 20,000 truckers have been placed OOS since enforcement of English Language Proficiency requirements resumed last year, over and above 28,000 CDLs being revoked completely. But there are two problems not being addressed.

One, “Out of Service” really only amounts to a ticket that the offending party, if they are illiterate, cannot even read. The order to remain out of service, that is, to park the truck and not drive it until the operator learns some effective English, or a literate replacement can be found, is also widely ignored, so much so that offending drivers are often caught by other DOT officers the very next day and charged with the very same violation, which the driver again ignores.

A second problem is that the companies who employ such drivers are only too happy to put them back out on the road; repeat ELP violations are a hallmark of the types of companies who wind up involved in high-profile crashes. A recent study by MC Advantage found that companies with numerous ELP violations are involved in other dangerous incidents at a higher rate than those who have issues with speeding or drunk drivers. A related problem is failing to have a CDL at all, which is one of the most common driver violations according to CVSA truck inspection statistics.

Perhaps it is too much to expect companies run by immigrants to hire drivers that comply with English language proficiency regulations? Is their reluctance to do so the result of nepotism, or maybe because they know American truckers fluent in English won’t put up with substandard wages?

A Los Angeles Times puff piece bemoaning Trump’s executive order gives us a clue about what’s going on here. In it, an Indian-owned trucking company owner expresses frustration at his inability to find drivers, specifically those of Indian descent, because they’re afraid of being caught up in the enforcement crackdown. He claims to have “doubled” the mileage rate he pays but still could not attract drivers. The LA Times failed to ask what that rate was, much less if he looked at hiring drivers of non-Indian descent.

Another problem is that 20,000-plus out of service orders and CDL revocations sounds like a lot but is in fact the tip of a massive iceberg. Earlier this year, a new rule change took effect that will prevent 200,000 “non-domiciled” licenses from renewing. But it does not cancel those CDLs immediately, which means many of those 200,000 are still operational and may be for several years yet. Some states have issued regular CDLs to drivers in the country illegally or granted work authorizations in a dubious fashion; one industry research group puts the number of migrants in the American trucking industry at 614,000 most of whom entered downstream of President Biden’s 2021 “Trucking Task Force.”

That “task force” produced what is probably better understood as a “task farce” that unnecessarily flooded the driver market at the behest of corporate lobbyists at the American Trucking Associations, effectively doubling the production of CDLs in one year rather than allowing market signals to bid up driver pay and draw new entrants naturally. This was to the benefit of every Fortune 500 company in the United States, but at a cost to everyone else, especially American truckers. Typically, there are somewhere between 1.8 and 2.5 million drivers employed in trucking jobs; was it really fair to displace quite possibly a third of American truckers with insourced labor?

The task force was followed in 2022 by something called Entry Level Driver Training, a supposed minimum standard by which all of the refugees and migrants and asylum seekers that President Biden sought to turn into truckers would be trained.

Unfortunately, the ELDT program, like so many others dreamt up by government acting on behalf of corporate America, was “self-certified,” and ultimately led to the proliferation of numerous truck driving schools that weren’t teaching their students much of anything. Many of these schools are paid for with taxpayer dollars, having been laundered through our friends in the non-government organization and nonprofit sectors under the veneer of “workforce development.” All so that America’s largest companies can avoid paying American truckers a decent wage.

Though Secretary Duffy has also been clamping down on CDL mills, he needs to go further. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administrator Derek Barrs has likewise told 60 Minutes that “We have a front door problem, meaning we need to stop this before they actually get into the system.” That problem is rooted in the fact that all it takes to register a trucking company in America is $300 and a pulse, and as it stands, the FMCSA has no way to conduct timely audits of new entrants to the market.

Though FMCSA has attempted to reform motor carrier registry with a new system called MOTUS, the rollout has been plagued with problems and appears to be allowing the same types of chameleon carriers to register and continue operating in dangerous and illegal ways. FMCSA, as I argued in an open letter in November 2024, needs to adjust its focus, as the nearly $1 billion agency is failing to ensure safety in the trucking industry.

Barrs would do well to hire some personnel directly from the trucking industry, even on a temporary basis, such that the FMCSA could better focus its resources. There are high-quality professionals with decades of experience whose knowledge of where the bodies are buried in the industry would prevent more burials, both literally and figuratively. Barrs’s current crop of bureaucrats and former ATA lobbyists are proving themselves not up to the task.

What of budding young American truckers hoping to some day go out and hit the road? Are we to expect that they compete with insourced labor and work for far less than what they would have expected even five years ago? It appears that there is oodles of money for “workforce development” programs that specifically target immigrants. What about young Americans?

There are a number of bills before Congress—some useful, like Dalilah’s Law, and a bunch that appear to be the work of bandwagon jumpers who want to make it look like they are “doing something.” The ante needs to be upped substantially by everyone from the Feds to state DOTs, prosecutors, and those in the industry who know better.

In the short term, I would suggest to Secretary Duffy that he work with state enforcement agencies to take another step with removing drivers who fail English language proficiency tests—and place their trucks out of service as well. It is beyond clear to everyone involved now that OOS orders applied to drivers are a type of theater, where law enforcement pretends to do something and the non-compliant pretend to follow the rules. One sure way to prevent an illiterate driver from ignoring a ticket he can’t read is to seize the truck until the owner shows up, pays the associated fines, and produces a driver who complies with the law.

Duffy has already partnered with other federal agencies and a tiny number of states, including Indiana and Oklahoma, allowing local authorities to assist with the removal of illegal aliens at truck inspection stations. But a significant number of non-compliant truckers appear to be using outlaw tactics such as avoiding Oklahoma and running through Kansas instead. Perhaps it is time for Duffy to request some cooperation from The Sunflower State. It would also send a message if Immigration and Customs Enforcement set up checkpoints outside Amazon fulfillment centers, U.S. Postal Service sorting plants, or Walmart distribution centers, which would make the point clear to those who are really behind this problem.

There are actions that can be taken to the management and ownership side of non-compliant and dangerous truckers as well. Though the invocation of this act is often met with derision from a certain type of lawyer, it appears that the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act could apply to all of the criminality we see in trucking right now. One of the key provisions is a “pattern of racketeering activity,” and foreign-operated chameleon carriers are rolling in it—registering multiple companies at apartment complexes against regulations, abusing work visas, employing drivers without CDLs or work visas, registering fleets of trucks to individual unit insurance policies, or tampering with their driver hours of service via backdoor electronic logging devices.

Thirty-three states have their own version of the RICO Act, and Trump administration officials ought to be encouraging their state-level partners to use every prosecutorial tool at their disposal to shut these operations down.

RICO investigations would pair well with an FMCSA tool called the Imminent Hazard Order. When companies have shown themselves to repeatedly flout necessary regulations and operate in the ways that chameleon carriers do, such an order would cancel their insurance and prevent unscrupulous shippers or brokers from giving them loads. It is a hammer that Barrs and his staff should swing more often.

One last suggestion is to ensure that various actors in our supply chains are actually present and accountable in the United States. Many of the carriers involved in the exploitation of insourced labor are located overseas, as are many freight brokers, the third-party intermediaries that some shippers use to arrange trucks. All of these actors require a motor carrier number to operate in America, but accountability for their actions is impossible if they are not located in the United States.

Many an American trucker is required to have what is called a Transportation Worker Identity Credential, or TWIC card, in order to access American port facilities. Part of the TWIC card validation process is verifying, amongst other things, that whoever holds it lives in the United States. It wouldn’t be all that difficult to require the same of trucking company management and brokers.

Trucking, as the cliché goes, is the lifeblood of our material economy, connecting every imaginable producer, factory, distributor, retailer, and consumer in this country. It should not be parasitized by foreign gangsters and big corporations using loopholes to deny Americans good, meaningful, and well-paid work. While I applaud Secretary Duffy, Administrator Barrs, President Trump, and the many lawmakers seeking to correct those problems, they need to tighten and enhance their efforts on our behalf. Lives, and careers, are on the line.