If the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrant truckers had a face, it would be Harjinder Singh. The Indian-born trucker was driving an 18-wheeler in Fort Pierce, Fla., in August when he allegedly made an illegal U-turn that caused a crash that killed three people. The Department of Homeland Security says Singh was in the U.S. illegally, though California Gov. Gavin Newsom contends Singh had a valid work permit when he applied for a commercial driver’s license. Singh has pleaded not guilty to three counts of vehicular homicide.
Singh’s case became a major story on conservative television and prompted a swift response from the federal government. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced new regulations that would make it harder for immigrants — including some here legally — to obtain commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs). “The process for issuing these licenses is absolutely 100% broken,” Duffy said in September. “It has become a threat to public safety, and it is a national emergency that requires action right now.” He added that there are too many foreign-born truckers who don’t know the rules of the road and don’t speak English proficiently, and warned, “We have people on the roads that aren’t safe, that aren’t qualified, that should never have a driver’s license. And lives are lost.”
The Department of Transportation says tougher CDL rules are needed after a series of deadly crashes involving foreign-born truckers and frames the changes as urgent safety measures. Critics, however, say the evidence does not support singling out immigrant drivers. They argue the initiative is effectively an immigration crackdown cloaked as a safety rule, driven by high-profile crashes amplified in conservative media rather than by broad data showing immigrant truckers are more dangerous.
Pawan Singh, a Northern Virginia trucking company owner (not related to Harjinder Singh), says some DOT concerns are legitimate. He started his company as a college student and now runs dozens of drivers across the mid-Atlantic and into Texas and Oklahoma. “The safety crackdown has been long overdue,” he said, noting that some driving schools push people through CDLs without giving them real skills. “An untrained driver is dangerous whether they were born here or they were born overseas,” he added, but worried the federal response appears focused on targeting foreign-born drivers rather than addressing training and licensing quality.
Sikhs, many from India’s Punjab region, are prominent in North American trucking and are easy to identify by turbans and beards, Pawan Singh said. That visibility, he and others argue, can turn individual incidents into stereotypes about a whole community.
Policy experts cite DOT data that undercuts the administration’s argument. Cassandra Zimmer-Wong, an immigration policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, says the emergency rule would sharply limit which immigrants without permanent status could obtain CDLs, leaving only certain temporary visa holders eligible and potentially pushing as many as 200,000 immigrant truckers out of the industry. The DOT is also urging states to revoke CDLs it says were issued “illegally” when state licenses outlast applicants’ federal work authorization. California has said it will revoke about 17,000 CDLs that don’t comply with state law requiring a CDL expiration date on or before the expiration of legal presence documents. The DOT has threatened to withhold $75 million in federal funds from Pennsylvania unless the state revokes CDLs the administration says were issued improperly.
Zimmer-Wong and others argue there’s no clear safety gain from these moves. DOT’s own audit of safety data, critics note, has not shown a connection between a trucker’s country of origin and driving records. “When I looked at the new rule and the way that it was written… it just feels very clear that the intention was to get immigrant drivers out of work, and it wasn’t necessarily about safety,” she said.
Legal pushback is already underway. A panel of judges from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily blocked the emergency rule while considering a challenge, though the administration continues to push to make the regulation permanent. The dispute highlights a tension between officials presenting the changes as needed to improve public safety and critics who see the measures as a way to reduce immigrant participation in the trucking industry without evidence that doing so would make roads safer.