The influx of foreign drivers into our trucking industry has been in the news several times in recent months because they’re killing other drivers.

Last August, three members of a Florida family were killed on the Florida Turnpike when a tractor-trailer driven by an illegal immigrant from India made an illegal U-turn in front of them.

Two months later, in California, there was more carnage as another illegal immigrant driver from India plowed through a line of stopped traffic, killing three.

Most recently, four Amish men in Indiana perished when a tractor-trailer driven by an illegal immigrant from Kyrgyzstan swerved across a rural highway and struck the van they were riding in head-on.

Reportedly, the truck driver was on that two-lane rural highway to avoid law enforcement. “That stretch of country road, as lonely as it is, has apparently turned into a trucking super route, with semis continually moving through there at significant speeds,” details Hot Air’s Beege Welborn. “It would make you wonder why, when there are interstates all around that would obviously be more direct and faster. Or so you think until you keep reading and hit an explanation that also had to do with yet another accident with basically the same players. There’s a weigh station on the interstate that many of these truckers are attempting to avoid.” In this case, driver Bekzhan Beishekeev was held after the accident on a bench warrant that turned out to be an ICE detainer.

It seems that truck driving has become a lucrative pipeline for bringing in illegal immigrants and putting them to work hauling tons of freight for peanuts, undercutting legitimate operators and putting them out of business. These so-called “chameleon carriers” incorporate under multiple names, as FreightWaves writer Rob Carpenter describes:

A chameleon carrier operation is about concealment. It’s about constructing a network of entities designed to evade regulatory detection and enforcement. The connective tissue can be any combination of shared Vehicle Identification Numbers moving between authorities, common officers or registered agents across multiple DOT numbers, identical or overlapping phone numbers and email addresses, the same branding and logos regardless of which company name appears on the door, common insurance brokers and policies, shared Electronic Logging Device infrastructure, overlapping financial services and accounting providers, coordinated recruitment pipelines from the same geographic origin, sequential authority registrations suggesting pre-planned entity creation, and shared terminal facilities where multiple authorities operate from the same physical location.

It’s like the Quality Learing Center for truck drivers.

In the case of Beishekeev, the carrier he was driving for was one among a web of entities based at a single address, with intertwined equipment and a small group of officers, all hailing from Kyrgyzstan. Allegedly, trucks were equipped with magnetic signs that allowed the listed company name and DOT identification number to be easily changed.

After the Florida tragedy last summer, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy initiated a compliance crackdown on operators who could not speak English and the CDL training schools from which they “graduated.” In all, 11,500 drivers who couldn’t pass English proficiency tests have been pulled off the road, and nearly half of the 16,000 CDL training schools have been closed for failing to meet standards of readiness first enacted in 2022. Many of these were already inactive, while the remainder could not prove compliance and were shuttered.

“This administration is cracking down on every link in the illegal trucking chain. Under Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, bad actors were able to game the system and let unqualified drivers flood our roadways. Their negligence endangered every family on America’s roadways, and it ends today,” said Duffy in a release. “Under President Trump, we are reigning in illegal and reckless practices that let poorly trained drivers get behind the wheel of semi-trucks and school buses.”

In addition to the requested compliance on training and the attempt to pull drivers who don’t speak English off the road, electronic logging devices have come under scrutiny as well.

Only one state has failed to honor Duffy’s request to help get non-English-speaking truck drivers off the road: California. This meant the Golden State lost $40 million of green as the federal government permanently revoked a share of its federal transportation funding, despite the state announcing it would begin complying in December.

While enforcement helps clean up the roads, it’s a difficult job. As Brandon Harnish, a local County Councilman in Indiana, pointed out on X, “An Amish family is shattered. A wife and mother lost her husband and her boys. Why? Because some wealthy foreign national launched a scam trucking company and put an illegal immigrant with a fraudulent CDL on Indiana’s roads. Foreigners get rich and Hoosiers pay for it in blood.”

Nearly everything in this vast nation of ours moves by truck at some point, so it’s important that drivers maintain the ability to safely share the road with the rest of us. Secretary Duffy appears to be doing his part while opening opportunities for drivers who are doing things the correct way, whether native-born or not. But we still have a long way to go, leaving too much of a risk that a chameleon may be careening down the highway next to you.