If the Trump administration's crackdown on immigrant truckers had a face, it would be Harjinder Singh. The Indian-born Singh was behind the wheel of an 18-wheeler in Fort Pierce, Fla. in August when he allegedly made an illegal U-turn, causing 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 he 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.
What's clear is that Singh's case has been a big story on conservative TV news, and prompted swift reaction from the Trump administration.
Within weeks, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced new regulations that would make it much harder for immigrants — even those in the country legally — to get commercial driver's licenses.
"The process for issuing these licenses is absolutely 100% broken," Duffy said at a press conference in September. "It has become a threat to public safety, and it is a national emergency that requires action right now."
There are too many foreign-born truckers who don't know the rules of the road, Duffy said, and don't speak English proficiently.
"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," Duffy said at another press conference in October.
The Department of Transportation wants tougher regulations for commercial driver's licenses after a series of deadly crashes involving foreign-born truckers, stating that these are urgently needed to make the nation's roads safer.
However, the administration's critics argue there's no data to support this claim, despite a handful of high-profile crashes that have garnered significant attention from conservative media. They argue the push for tougher regulations amounts to an immigration crackdown by another name.
The Trump administration's crackdown is putting immigrant truckers in a difficult spot — particularly those who've been in the business for a while.
Pawan Singh was still a senior in college when he started his own trucking company in Northern Virginia. Now Singh, who is not related to Harjinder Singh, has dozens of drivers working for him, driving rigs between the mid-Atlantic to Texas and Oklahoma. And he's quick to admit that some of the problems that the DOT has identified are real.
"The safety crackdown has been long overdue," Singh said in an interview at the company's headquarters and maintenance garage.
There are drivers on the road who are not qualified, Singh says, who've passed through schools that help them get CDL's quickly, without really giving them the skills to operate an 18-wheeler safely — though Singh says that's not just a problem for immigrants.
"An untrained driver is dangerous whether they were born here or they were born overseas," Singh said. "Some of the schools that are just using rubber stamps to issue these driver's licenses, there should definitely be a crackdown there."
But Singh is worried that the Trump administration appears less focused on that problem. Instead, it seems more intent on targeting foreign-born drivers — in particular, Sikhs like himself and Harjinder Singh, the driver in the fatal Florida crash.
Like other immigrants from the Punjab region of India, Sikhs have a big presence in the North American trucking industry. And Pawan Singh says Sikhs are easy to spot because they wear turbans and have long beards.
"When we're out on the road, we're likely to stick out like a sore thumb, although there might be other drivers making those mistakes. But when a minority community makes the same mistakes, it becomes a stereotype," he said.
It's a stereotype that is not supported by the data. In fact, the Trump administration's critics say, there's no evidence that foreign-born truckers are any more dangerous than their native-born counterparts.
"It just feels like this is an immigration raid by another name," said Cassandra Zimmer-Wong, an immigration policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, a think-tank in Washington, D.C. that supports free markets.
The Trump administration's emergency rule would sharply limit which immigrants without permanent legal status are eligible for CDLs, leaving only workers on a few types of temporary visas eligible to work as truckers. Zimmer-Wong says that would effectively push as many as 200,000 immigrant truckers out of the industry.
The federal Department of Transportation is also pushing states to revoke CDLs that it says were issued illegally because the licenses are valid beyond the date when the applicant's federal work authorization documents expire.
Already, California has said it will revoke 17,000 CDLs that don't comply with state law because "the expiration date of a CDL must be on or before the expiration of the legal presence documents provided to the DMV," a spokesman for the California State Transportation Agency said in a statement to NPR.
The DOT is also threatening to withhold $75 million in federal funds from Pennsylvania unless the commonwealth revokes CDLs that the Trump administration says were issued illegally.
But Zimmer-Wong says there's no clear benefit to public safety from all of this. Even DOT's own audit of safety data has found no evidence of a connection between a trucker's country of origin and their driving record, she notes.
"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," Zimmer-Wong said in an interview.
A panel of judges from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals had its own concerns about the emergency rule, blocking it temporarily while the court weighs a legal challenge. But the Trump administration is still pushing to make the rule permanent.
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