WASHINGTON, D.C.— According to a post on X from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the U.S. government has stopped giving out all labor permits for commercial truck drivers right away. The decision was made when an Indian national named Harjinder Singh was driving a commercial truck in Florida on August 12 and crashed into another car, killing three people.
Rubio said that “more and more foreign drivers are driving large tractor-trailer trucks on U.S. roads, which is putting American lives at risk and hurting the livelihoods of American truckers.” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy made a similar statement before this one. He started an investigation into the tragedy and attacked what he called “non-enforcement and radical immigration policies” that had let “unqualified foreign drivers” get licenses.
The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (FLHSMV) says that Singh got a commercial driver’s license (CDL) from California after coming to the U.S. illegally in 2018. The event has swiftly turned into a big political issue, with the Trump administration and California Governor Gavin Newsom publicly arguing over who is to blame.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) got involved and said that Singh’s work visa was denied under the first Trump administration but approved in June 2021 under the Biden administration. But Newsom’s office said that Singh first came to the U.S. in 2018, while Trump was president for the first time.
The Florida Highway Patrol said that Singh was trying to conduct an illegal U-turn in a commercial truck when the collision happened. A video taken inside the vehicle just before the incident went viral. It showed the truck obstructing all lanes of traffic on the Florida Turnpike. A 30-year-old guy from Florida, a 37-year-old lady, and a 54-year-old male were all killed in the crash.
Singh is facing three counts of vehicular homicide. The U.S. Marshals caught him in California, and he is now being held on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainer. Before being sent back to his home country, he will have to go to court in Florida.
The U.S. government has done several things to deal with the problem of foreign truck drivers. In April, President Trump signed an executive order that required commercial drivers to be able to speak English fluently. In June, inspectors from the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance started giving truckers out-of-service citations if they couldn’t pass roadside language tests. The Department of Transportation said that the purpose is to make the roads safer after accidents where a driver couldn’t read road signs or speak English may have led to deaths in traffic.