How surprised were you to learn that the person behind the wheel of that 80,000-pound tractor-trailer towering over you at a high rate of speed on the highway might be an illegal alien who neither reads nor speaks nor understands English, including rules of the road and street signs? You probably figured that someone operating that enormous, powerful, potentially dangerous, and important segment of the transportation industry has been trained in accordance with standards set by a government agency, and that a government official has verified that to be the case.
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Only after social media began featuring videos of the carnage caused by foreign nationals who clearly had no business operating big rigs did the public awaken to the fact that laws intended to promote highway safety were either ineffective or not enforced or both.
How has this happened? The short answer is four levels of complete and utter government failure:
- the complete and utter refusal of many states to comply with federal law;
- the complete and utter failure of the responsible federal agency to detect and deal with that refusal and impose the penalties the law provides;
- the complete and utter failure of the relevant agency’s Inspector General to detect the agency’s failure;
- the complete and utter absence of Congressional oversight.
More detailed answers can be found in an August 5, 2026 by FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. It is titled License to Kill: Uncovering the Anti-Borders Takeover of the National CDL Program.
FAIR’s report summarizes ten accidents, naming the driver, his country of origin, how he entered the U.S., which state granted him a commercial driver’s license (CDL), in which state the accident occurred, the names of the victims, and the current status of the driver and the charges against him. The report also describes the drivers’ errors that led to the accidents, how and by whom the drivers were arrested, and what happened then.
Six of the featured drivers are from India, five of whom are named Singh. One is a Haitian national paroled into the U.S. by the Biden administration. One is from Kyrgyzstan and entered the U.S. using the “CBP One” app, the mobile app the Biden administration’s Customs and Border Protection adapted to facilitate the entry of foreign nationals into the U.S. (The Trump administration re-adapted it to CBP Home, facilitating the self-deportation of aliens illegally in the U.S.) One is an Uzbek national granted entry into the U.S. under the Biden administration’s diversity lottery. One from China entered the U.S. illegally and was released into the U.S. by the Biden administration.
Six of these drivers had been issued their commercial driver’s licenses by the state of California. Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York each issued one of them.
It is not only the people in the state that are issued the license who are in danger from incompetent and unqualified drivers. Holders of commercial driver’s licenses issued by California killed people not only in California but also in Florida, Oregon, and Indiana. The holder of a commercial driver’s license issued by New York killed one person and injured two in Tennessee. The holder of a commercial driver’s license issued by Pennsylvania killed four people and injured one in Indiana. It was Massachusetts that issued the commercial driver’s license to the driver who killed one person in Pennsylvania.
The relevant federal laws are straightforward:
The Commercial Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1986 set uniform minimum standards for commercial driver qualification. State agencies are responsible for administering the tests and issuing the credentials. Compliance with the law and regulations should mean a uniform national standard of driver competence.
The created the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (the Agency) within the Department of Transportation to regulate and exercise safety oversight of commercial motor vehicles. Among other duties, the Agency is charged with conducting an annual performance review of each state’s commercial driver’s license program to confirm compliance with federal law. Failure to comply with federal requirements can lead to a reduction in federal highway funds the state would otherwise receive.
English language proficiency has been required since 1937. The Agency’s regulations implement this requirement:
Interpreters are prohibited during the administration of skills tests. Applicants must be able to understand and respond to verbal commands and instructions in English by a skills test examiner. Neither the applicant nor the examiner may communicate in a language other than English during the skills test.
Nonetheless, FAIR’s License to Kill report details numerous states that administer the test in languages other than English. California offers the test in five languages besides English. Pennsylvania tops the list, offering the test in 34 different languages. You read that right: 34 languages.
It is clear the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has fallen far short in exposing the danger to which sanctuary states have negligently sabotaged highway safety. Through its nationwide public-records campaign, FAIR obtained considerable additional information. License to Kill reveals the states’ near-complete abandonment of any effort to comply with federal requirements, simultaneously with an explosion in the number of commercial driver’s licenses foreign nationals applied for and were granted.
Where are the pre-2025 Agency reports that states are violating federal law by administering the test in foreign languages? And where are the Office of Inspector General reports that warn Department of Transportation officials that its Agency is failing in its responsibilities?
President Trump’s May 2, 2025, Executive Order 14286, “Enforcing Commonsense Rules of the Road for America’s Truck Drivers,” declares that the Trump administration will enforce the English language proficiency requirement for commercial truck drivers. Did it really need to be stated that the administration would enforce the law?
Yes. Because in 2016 President Obama, with none of the formalities that should accompany such an action, reversed the stated policy of earlier administrations and instructed roadside inspectors not to place drivers out of service for failure to meet the English-language proficiency requirement.
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With President Trump back in the White House, federal laws are once again being enforced. License to Kill describes the results of performance reviews conducted during this administration. As a result of the Agency’s issuance of Final Determinations of Noncompliance to California and New York, the Trump administration is withholding $158.3 million and $73.5 million in federal highway funds from those states. Continued noncompliance could result in these withholdings doubling and the states’ commercial driver’s license programs being decertified completely. The Agency has issued Preliminary Determinations of Noncompliance to the District of Columbia and 24 states. These Preliminary Determinations require the states and D.C. to take remedial action to avoid losing federal highway funds.
On July 16, 2026, the Secretaries of Transportation and of Homeland Security announced that their agencies have been working together to take unqualified big rig drivers off our nation’s highways and shut down fraudulent commercial driver’s license mills. Their joint press release reported that they had already “knocked over 24,000 drivers off our roads for failing to speak English, forced states to cancel over 28,000 licenses illegally issued to foreign drivers, and purged over 9,500 unqualified training schools from our [Agency] registry.” On August 31, 2026, they announced they had taken 28,000 drivers off the road for failing to speak English, forced states to cancel more than 30,000 licenses illegally issued to foreign drivers, and purged more than 8,000 unqualified training schools from the Agency’s registry. They also announced that the Department of Justice is involved as well, preparing to bring charges against state motor vehicle officials who give commercial licenses to English-illiterate drivers. An excellent article in Overdrive, a publication for American truckers, details and applauds these developments.
To assist it in the performance of its oversight responsibilities, the Agency has long contracted with the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (the Association) to maintain a centralized national database of the commercial driver’s licenses. To enable more progress in their effort to get illegal aliens and otherwise unqualified big rig drivers off our nation’s highways, the Departments of Transportation and Homeland Security asked the Association for information from that database of 17 million commercial driver’s licenses.
Federal regulations require that, as a condition of its ability to issue commercial driver’s licenses, a state must cooperate with the Agency’s review and provide any information the Agency requests. Notwithstanding this requirement, 22 states and the District of Columbia immediately ran to court to prevent the Association from turning over the information.
What followed was a rapid-fire flurry of back-and-forth filings in federal court. The states are demanding that the Association, which is the central repository of the states’ commercial driver’s license information, be prevented from providing its records to the Departments of Transportation and Homeland Security. One of the states’ allegations is that the Department of Homeland Security will use the information to enforce immigration laws. Quelle horreur! More filings and oral arguments about the Association’s records are scheduled for early September.
Several members of Congress have introduced legislation to address the weaknesses in federal highway safety laws. After the August recess, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on “Sanctuary Policies, Tragic Consequences.” Marcus Coleman’s clear-eyed understanding from personal experience made him an important and impassioned witness. His rejection of Democrat lawmakers’ faux sympathy and remonstrance that they prefer the comfort of illegal aliens to the safety of Americans went viral.
His daughter Dalilah was five years old in 2024 when Partap Singh, an illegal alien from India—whom the Biden administration released into the U.S. in 2022, and to whom the state of California had issued a commercial driver’s license—slammed his 18-wheeler into numerous cars, including the one in which she was a passenger. She sustained permanent life-altering injuries. Dalilah and her parents were President Trump’s guests at his State of the Union address in January 2026, to honor them and call attention to the need to enforce and strengthen highway safety laws.
The Dalilah Law (S. 3917) and its companion, H.R. 7793, have been introduced in the Senate and House but have proceeded no further. Another Dalilah’s Law, H.R. 5688, was reported out of the relevant committee in March 2026 but has advanced no further.
FAIR’s report describes the proposed legislation and offers its own detailed legislative recommendations. Briefly stated, they are that the law should
- contain strict eligibility requirements,
- enforce English language proficiency,
- specify the circumstances resulting in automatic loss of a state’s federal highway funds and decertification of its CDL program,
- demand document retention and transparency regarding CDL applicants, and
- close the loopholes that enabled the current crisis of dangerously incompetent big rig drivers.
To this list of recommendations should be added increasing the penalties states suffer when they defy federal law. Clearly the consequences embodied in current law are insufficient to compel compliance.
As with much of government, like immigration enforcement, the problem is not lack of laws but lack of competent and diligent enforcement of existing laws. This requires agencies to do their jobs and inspectors general to investigate and confirm that they do. And it requires Congress to conduct meaningful oversight.
The consequences of the Biden-era state of affairs are, as FAIR’s License to Kill report writes:
. . . measured in the dozens of preventable deaths and catastrophic injuries that continue to occur on our roads. They are also measured in the erosion of public trust, the increased insurance costs borne by compliant carriers, and the difficulties in enforcing immigration law when state DMVs hand credentials to individuals who have no legal right to remain in the country.
Americans must ask how laws intended to promote highway safety were blatantly ignored and violated long enough to enable tens of thousands of unqualified, English-illiterate foreigners to be driving 18-wheelers on our highways. In particular, voters must demand that their elected representatives explain how they permitted it to happen.
P.S. Although thousands of English-illiterate illegal aliens have been taken off the road, unknown numbers remain behind the wheels of big rigs. Just this Wednesday, September 2, 2026, 50 year-old American Brenda Watson was killed in Ohio when Manjit Singh, traveling at an excessive rate of speed, crushed her southbound 2012 Chevy Cruze head-on as he drove his northbound semi-truck into her lane to pass another northbound car.
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