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The trucking industry is America’s arteries, hauling essential goods across the country to make our lives easier.
Yet greed, human trafficking and illegal labor have clogged our nation’s arteries for years, resulting in the theft of wages from traditionally working-class US jobs to the deaths of innocent Americans caught in this systemic failure.
When we discuss illegal immigration, we usually mention industries like agriculture, construction and manual labor in warehouses.
But the supposedly heavily regulated trucking industry has become a hot spot for illegal labor.
America suddenly got a peek at this after the horrific Aug. 12 crash on Florida’s Turnpike that killed three people.
Indian-born tractor-trailer driver Harjinder Singh, 28, is in the country illegally and can’t speak English yet possessed a non-domicile commercial driver’s license from California.
This accident was a pivotal point for President Trump and his administration, which demanded states enforce the English-proficiency requirement for driving commercial trucks that’s existed since 1937.
Another tragedy occurred just Tuesday: Illegal-immigrant truck driver Bekzhan Beishekeev, from Kyrgyzstan, allegedly killed four people in a crash in Jay County, Ind.
The Department of Homeland Security said he entered the country using the Biden administration’s CBP One cellphone app. Team Biden released him via parole, and Pennsylvania gave him his CDL.
“This accident should have never have happened. This is a well known chameleon carrier within freight-industry social-media circles, and [Transportation Secretary] Sean Duffy himself was engaging with social-media posts bringing attention to their actions last year. We are beyond the point of blaming previous administrations now — it is time to shut these networks down for good,” Justin Martin, an 18-year trucking-industry veteran, told The Post.
Most Americans believed, as I did, that the trucking industry had plenty of safeguards and rules to keep the wrong companies from operating and strict enforcement of who should be on the road, alongside consequences for breaching the rules.
“You can set up a trucking company in a day,” Martin said.
New carrier registrations have skyrocketed, from around 50,000 in 2016 to 158,000 in 2023. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration regulates the field under the Department of Transportation.
“Starting around 2016, 2018 is really when the floodgates opened. The Obama administration passed a new rule in the FMCSA that got rid of the English-language requirement for truck drivers. They were importing the drivers that they wanted.”
The rule told inspectors to give a warning to drivers not proficient in English rather than take them off the road. Bad actors took advantage of the ease of creating a trucking business, overwhelming enforcement with overnight companies that are difficult to regulate and hiring illegal immigrants at lower labor rates.
Trump’s Office of Management and Budget is moving to address the massive problem.
Its interim final rule “Restoring Integrity to the Issuance of Non-Domiciled CDLs” had a status change last week into “pending review.”
When we discuss human trafficking in the trucking industry, we automatically think about people being smuggled in the trucks and sometimes tragically dying due to heat exhaustion.
But Martin explained that human trafficking can be with the drivers themselves, who are sometimes brought to America under false pretenses.
“They’re basically lied to in their home country. They come here, and they bring the families along. Well, they and their family will get put into an apartment building in Chicago somewhere [for example]. The husband will be put in the truck sent over the road. And now that they have him behind the wheel hauling freight, the family is held hostage.”
To get the full view of this problem, we have to zoom out and understand how that illegal immigrant gets into a truck in the first place.
The trucking industry suffers chronically from a supply-and-demand issue, with companies complaining about not having enough drivers to keep up with shipping needs.
Many smaller independent trucking companies quickly sourced their drivers from the black market, undercutting longstanding companies and putting some out of business permanently.
“Over the period of them trying to reduce these standards, we saw a dramatic rise in the number of fatal truck-involved commercial-motor-vehicle accidents and also injury-involved commercial-motor-vehicle accidents,” lamented Shannon Everett, founder of American Truckers United.
Company owners would use brokerage firms to act as middlemen to bid on contracts from shippers, like Amazon or Walmart.
It’s a normal practice in the industry, but a problem comes into play when brokerage firms and shippers stop asking questions about the carriers they’re using to deliver goods across our nation and pretend not to know what’s really going on.
“It’s the multibillion-dollar brokerages and shippers that have lobbied our legislators to reduce the licensing standards, to reduce enforcement, to reduce the accountability to a point that now they don’t exist,” Everett told The Post.
“Prior to 2021, brokerages had to negotiate with American-owned trucking companies for capacity,” he added. “They don’t call us. They don’t call American trucking companies anymore because now they have their own capacity. And so they game the system.”
Amazon and Walmart might be the first companies you think are benefiting from brokers who contract with carriers that hire illegal immigrants — but it goes beyond private corporations to the public sector as well. “The United States Postal Service over the last five years has almost completely gutted all the American-owned trucking companies that have historically worked for the United States Postal Service for decades, and they have replaced them with multibillion-dollar brokerages,” Everett said.
It happens in many industries in which some companies exploit illegal labor: Everyone knows what’s going on, but the increase in profits muzzles changes, and there are so many pieces to the puzzle that nailing down the party responsible is difficult.
Shippers like Amazon or Walmart will offload accountability if an illegal driver is behind the wheel, and brokerages will point the finger at the shady carriers.
Meanwhile, those carriers who do get caught are shut down but will form a new LLC in 24 hours under a different name and begin carrying loads once again — which is illegal.
Even when a carrier employed an illegal driver who causes a death on the road, punishment for the parties involved rarely comes, and it leaves the families of victims without justice.
“He was my soulmate. He was my best friend. We did everything together,” reminisced Deann Miller who lost her husband, Scott Miller, June 11, 2024.
The driver, Ignacio Cruz-Mendoza, a 16-time-deported illegal immigrant from Mexico, lost control of his truck, and metal piping fell onto Miller’s car, crushing him to death.
“I met my husband when I was 17. I really don’t know life without him. We had been together for 47 years, and he was my soulmate,” Deann Miller tearfully told The Post.
“My husband was 64, and we had just retired. We had just sold our trucking business in 2022. He had about two years of retirement; we had all kinds of plans. We were looking forward to spending our retirement together. And now I’m alone. I have to live the rest of my life alone because somebody took my soulmate from me.”
Cruz-Mendoza received a downgraded charge of misdemeanor careless driving, leaving him to serve just 9 months and 23 days in jail — a grave injustice.
Scott Miller, who was coincidentally a veteran trucker himself, lost his life thanks to several systemic failures in the trucking industry.
Beyond the illegal-immigrant driver who shouldn’t have been allowed to drive the vehicle and is unable to speak English, the truck hadn’t been inspected in more than two years, and the flatbed wasn’t regulated to carry hundreds of 500-to-1,000-pound steel piping.
This was compounded by the shipper not properly securing the load on the truck, which would have lessened the damage after the truck jackknifed.
The carrier that hired the driver, Monique Trucking, had 18 violations at the time of the accident, with the FMCSA demanding the company shut down for years.
The agency’s imminent-hazard out-of-service order detailed multiple times it ordered Monique Trucking to end operations — all of which were ignored
“You have repeatedly engaged in conduct designed to evade regulation and oversight by the FMCSA,” the report states.
“Despite being placed out of service, you continued to operate after April 16, 2024. A May 1, 2024 roadside inspection placed you OOS for ‘Operating in violation of FMCSA Operational Out of Service order for Failure to permit a Safety Audit.’ . . . The officer that conducted the May 1, 2024 roadside investigation informed driver Alvarado that Monique Trucking was subject to a federal out of service order.”
Shady companies often attempt to take loads under different carrier names to avoid scrutiny (also illegal). “After being informed of this fact, driver Alvarado stated he had an additional USDOT Number, and showed the officer a poster board sign with 3894417 TPO Transports handwritten on it. During the June 2024 investigation, you were questioned about Monique Trucking’s use of the TPO Transports sign, and Mr. Agramon stated that he suggested using the TPO Transport sign so that Monique Trucking could get loads under TPO.”
Monique Trucking was constantly cited for violations, and it never stopped the company from taking loads. Owner Manrique Agramon did not respond to The Post’s requests for comment.
Scott Miller would be alive if we didn’t have weak enforcement that turns shutdown notices into the equivalent of a parking ticket.
The load Cruz-Mendoza was hauling for Monique Trucking was brokered by a multibillion-dollar corporation called Total Quality Logistics, which, among other brokerages, has massively profited from the rapid growth of illegal labor in the market and small carriers’ use of middleman brokerages.
In 2016, the year of President Barack Obama’s memo, TQL’s gross revenue was $2.6 billion; it peaked in 2022, at the height of southern-border illegal immigration, at more than $7.9 billion.
With such big money to be made, brokerages are standing behind a pending Supreme Court case, Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, which would provide them immunity from legal liability.
The federal government filed an amicus brief in support: “The safety exception is narrow and applies only to regulations ‘with respect to motor vehicles,’ not broker services. Allowing these claims would impose undue burdens on brokers, disrupting the efficient flow of goods.”
If the case is decided in brokerages’ favor, they will have immunity in scenarios like Scott Miller’s death from being sued for their portion of negligence. In normal circumstances, you might argue the responsibility lies solely on the carrier who hired the driver, but the problem is sketchy carriers are small and operate illegally and fraudulently.
How do you sue a company that lists its business address as a random parking lot, UPS Store or somewhere overseas? Trucking is a boom-and-bust industry, and everyone is afraid of tomorrow and points fingers at others when they are just as culpable.
Every aspect of the trade has failed families like Scott Miller’s because the tragedies were all preventable.
The FMCSA lacks the capacity to inspect every new carrier that hits the scene properly, and even when they move to shut down bad operators, it’s as effective as a lion without teeth.
While the Trump administration’s efforts to enforce English-language standards have helped, catching five to 10 people a day is a drop in the bucket when the FMCSA estimates there are around 200,000 illegal commercial drivers on the road.
And does it even matter if we catch them when they could easily find another carrier to work with the nexyt day on TikTok or Facebook? What’s the point of laws and regulations if they’re not enforced? If shut-down carriers can start another company tomorrow, even after they’re culpable for someone’s death?
Yes, there are trucking-related accidents and deaths all the time, and they didn’t start when illegal immigrants started hauling goods. But every person who dies because of an illegal driver is a preventable death because the trucker would have never been behind the wheel if our system functioned properly.
The only justice Deann Miller received didn’t come from the criminal-justice system or even the trucking industry; it came from ICE.
Immigration enforcement learned what happened and assured her they’d be there the day he stepped out of jail and deport him back to Mexico. They kept their promise.
The system’s failures have left behind a grieving widow, children who can’t hug their father anymore and grandchildren cut short the privilege of receiving his love. Victims like Scott Miller aren’t numbers on a spreadsheet to weigh risk versus reward; they were human beings who deserved protection from greed and callousness.
Adam B. Coleman is the author of “The Children We Left Behind” and founder of Wrong Speak Publishing.
English (US)