Carnage on America's roads as new deadly threat sparks alarm

Ten times in 2023, Harjinder Singh took the written test to obtain his commercial truck driver's license and ten times the India-born 28-year-old failed. Finally, after two months of attempts, he passed. But two years later, Singh would make a mistake that didn't allow for ten - or even two - chances. While driving an 18-wheel truck through east-central Florida in August 2025, Singh attempted to make an illegal U-turn through a gap in a highway divider marked 'Official Use Only,' putting his tractor-trailer directly in the path of a minivan. Three men in the van were killed. Singh was arrested and charged with three counts of vehicular homicide and three counts of manslaughter. He has pleaded not guilty.

For the families of the victims, it was agony heaped on agony to learn that Singh had not only failed multiple written and practical tests, but that he had come to the United States illegally. He crossed from Mexico in 2018 and received an Employment Authorization Document (EAD), which allows non-citizens to work in the US. What's more, after the Florida crash, investigators with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration said Singh failed his English proficiency tests, answering just two of 12 verbal questions correctly and he could only correctly identify one of four traffic signs. Regardless, he had been given a commercial license by Washington state in July 2023 and another just a year later by California. And while the case is shocking, it's not isolated.

'There's so much illegal behavior and so little enforcement that it's now just the Wild West,' said Steve Viscelli, a University of Pennsylvania professor and qualified truck driver, who was tapped to join a 2022 Biden White House task force on trucking. On October 21, another Indian national, 21-year-old Jashanpreet Singh's 18-wheel truck plowed into four cars in Ontario, California, killing three and injuring four. He was charged with three counts of vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence and reckless driving. Jashanpreet Singh has pleaded not guilty. And he, too, crossed illegally into the US from Mexico in 2022 and obtained his EAD upon claiming asylum, authorities said. Then this fall, officials in Oklahoma, a vital crossroads for long-distance haulage, carried out a series of stoppages along their highways and found at least a fifth of the truck drivers they questioned had entered the country illegally.

In late September, Kevin Stitt, the governor of Oklahoma, said that 520 vehicles had been pulled over, and 91 of the truck drivers - almost 25 percent - were using 'fraudulent licenses.' A second check, at the end of October, found 34 out of 209 truckers were neither citizens, residents nor visa holders. Now a Daily Mail investigation has revealed widespread alarm among truckers and industry experts about the increasing carnage on America's roads, which they say is caused largely by inexperienced, unqualified drivers - some of whom are in the country illegally. The Trump administration is trying to change that. Sean Duffy, Trump's secretary of transport, sees himself as a new sheriff in town. Many would argue he couldn't arrive a moment too soon.

Fatal highway truck accidents have steadily increased over the past decade, according to the latest statistics released by the National Highway Safety Administration. But the most pronounced year-to-year spike in deaths occurred between 2020 and 2021, when the number of people killed in traffic crashes involving large trucks shot up 16 percent – from 4,945 to 5,821. The next year was even worse: 5,969 were killed in 2022, a nearly 20 percent increase from 2020. In 2023, fatalities dipped slightly but still remained ten percent above 2020. These alarming increases may be coincidental and are presumably influenced by many factors, but they do coincide with a Biden administration initiative to speed through the processing of commercial driver's licenses.

In 2021, the Biden administration urged states to find ways to approve more licenses, as the country grappled with COVID-era logistics challenges that snared the nation's supply chains. From February 2022 onwards, driving training and test centers were allowed to self-certify their own programs, meaning with no state or federal oversight. There are now over 32,000 self-registered 'training providers' listed in the federal registry. Biden's reforms also led to states massively expanding the issuance of non-domicile CDLs, granting them to many who had an EAD, even if they had entered the country illegally. This came hot on the heels of the watering down of English language requirements: previously drivers who could not converse in English with a police officer or official could have their license revoked. Obama-era rules from 2015 had rescinded that order.

Applicants can now take their written test for the CDL in almost any language: Virginia currently offers tests in 26, including the West African dialect Twi, Nepali, Pashto and Haitian Creole. Anyone wanting to drive should in theory be able to read road signs and converse with traffic officials. In practice, industry insiders told the Daily Mail, enforcement is sparse. Raman Dhillon, CEO of the North American Punjabi Trucking Association, said that he warned during a 2022 Biden White House meeting that there was insufficient oversight of new drivers and haulage companies, and told the assembled officials that 'this is going to be a crisis coming in.' mDhillon told industry website Overdrive: 'A person crossing the border with no experience or nothing gets a work permit in two months, and within one month gets their CDL. Well, they never even drove a car in this country, so why are we doing this? This is not even an issue for the trucking industry. This is a national security issue.'

Shannon Everett, head of Arkansas-based American Truckers United, told the Daily Mail he had 'evidence of guys who were issued EAD cards, and then, five days later, were issued CDLs.' Everett pointed the finger at unions representing large haulage companies, which have for decades claimed that there was a nationwide driver shortage. But other observers argue that the problem is not a shortage of truckers, but the retention: over 90 percent of drivers quit within their first year. 'They get underpaid, treated like [expletive], kept away from home, not trained properly, and basically put through a meat grinder, and they quit,' said Gord Magill, a truck driver and analyst whose Substack Autonomous Truck(er)s monitors the industry. Regardless, the Biden team's loosening up of restrictions had an immediate impact.

In April 2022, the White House boasted that their efforts to push more people into the profession had resulted in 876,000 CDLs issued between January 2021 and April 2022 - more than double the usual number. 'We're now seeing the fruits of what they did,' said Danielle Chaffin, a Nashville-based analyst. 'And it's awful.' California, with the biggest container port in the United States and a large migrant population, has long been identified by the Trump administration as a problem. The issue is undeniably political - President Donald Trump and his team are taking a cudgel to Governor Gavin Newsom - but it's also undeniably real.

'I've done a lot of work in California on these issues, and the state does have some work to do to enforce some of its own laws,' said Viscelli, the Pennsylvania-based professor, who worked on Congressional and Californian task forces investigating the situation. 'The problems are complicated but they're certainly there.' Duffy announced on October 26 he was withholding $160 million in federal funds for California, after the state refused to stop issuing CDLs to non-residents and refused to review the 60,000 licenses it had granted. Duffy had previously pulled $40 million from the state for failing to enforce English proficiency tests. He further threatened to prevent California from handing out any new CDLs. On Wednesday, California revoked 17,000 non-domiciled commercial drivers' licenses.

'After weeks of claiming they did nothing wrong, Gavin Newsom and California have been caught red-handed,' said Duffy last week. 'This is just the tip of the iceberg. My team will continue to force California to prove they have removed every illegal immigrant from behind the wheel of semitrucks and school buses.' Cole Stevens, the youngest of three brothers at family-owned Stevens Trucking, told the Daily Mail that legitimate operators, like him, are being pushed out of the industry entirely. 'The safe American carriers that have run our business for 30, 40, 50 years - we've never seen anything like the price suppression that's gone on in the last three years,' said Stevens. 'When you have potentially nefarious actors willing to go get illicit licenses, then what else are they doing with their business?'

He paused, and gasped. From the driver's seat of his pickup truck, near the Oklahoma City depot from which their business is run, Stevens watched as an 18-wheeler driver hauling an Amazon cargo sped through a 'cars only' sign, risking the lives of any motorist in the way. 'It's getting worse and worse,' he said. 'If my drivers did that, the authorities would come for me: they know where I live, they know where my business is. But a lot of these companies just vanish when there's a problem. There's no accountability. 'They're not even going to see the wreck on the news that blows up an American family of five because they're in another country. They're just counting their money while gutting this industry,' he said.