Truckin’ is an American pastime and has long been a way for nearly anyone to attain the American dream. No formal education is required other than an ability to read road signs and pass a commercial driver’s license test.
The average salary of a truck driver today is $60,000, which is enough to live on with the ability to reside in an inexpensive area, or nowhere permanent at all. Strict regulations prohibit driving a truck more than 11 hours per day and 60 on-duty hours per week, as a safeguard against overworking behind the wheel.
But foreigners who cannot read road signs or speak and understand English have flooded this job market, depressing wages for Americans and putting all of us at risk on the road. A whopping 18 percent of truck drivers are foreign-born, and 200,000 of them lack citizenship.
Learning to drive in another country does not prepare foreign-born drivers for high-speed, construction-laden, traffic-congested American highways. At one moment a driver is making good time at high speeds of 70 mph, and then suddenly, the cars ahead are stopped without warning, creating a risk of a pile-up.
Increasingly, there are warnings flashed on electronic signs above our highways, but those signs are ineffective with drivers who cannot read English. Foreign drivers are also not going to understand weather alerts about icy roads or flash floods.
“Last year alone, illegal aliens with commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs) caused at least 30 deaths and many, many very seriously injured,” President Trump said on July 30. “We’ve already removed more than 24,000 non-English speakers from behind the wheel,” he added.
In the month of August alone, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) arrested 95 illegal aliens who were working as truck drivers. Some 82 of these drivers had received their commercial driver’s licenses from the Democrat-controlled states of California and New York, mostly from California.
Trump’s Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy observed that 239 people have died in vehicle crashes caused by non-English-speaking truck drivers since Trump took office in January 2025. Most of the foreign drivers who caused those fatal accidents received their CDLs from Gavin Newsom’s California.
On Monday, Secretary Duffy took forceful action to correct this outrage. He announced that the Department of Transportation is shutting down 110 driving schools for violations of English language proficiency (ELP) requirements.
Duffy commented that illegal aliens who cannot understand English “don’t deserve to be in a big rig driving on American roads endangering American citizens.” He added, “If you’re not well skilled, you’re not well trained.”
“If you’re not well licensed, you have no place driving an 18-wheeler — 80,000 pounds — on American roadways,” Duffy said. He called the 110 schools that he shut down the “greatest offenders,” and he closed another 160 schools for reasons including inadequately trained instructors.
The president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, Todd Spencer, cheered Duffy’s decision. Spencer thanked the Trump Administration “for taking concrete actions to crack down on fraudulent training operations and restore rigorous English language proficiency enforcement.”
Incredibly, 21 Democrat-controlled states and the District of Columbia are suing the Department of Transportation (DOT), DOT officials, and the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) to block the DOT’s demand for AAMVA to produce records that would identify the foreigners driving trucks. A separate lawsuit from 22 Democrat states and D.C. targets the Department of Homeland Security for making an identical demand of AAMVA.
Democrats are obstructing the disclosure of these records based on contrived arguments, such as the alleged privacy of Social Security numbers in the databases. The Trump Administration already has all those numbers by administering the Social Security program, and illegal aliens shouldn’t be using them anyway.
Trump has threatened to terminate more than $10 million in federal funding to the AAMVA for refusing his reasonable request to turn over this data. Trump seeks the last five years from this CDL Information System.
On August 14, a federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush blocked a subpoena by the Department of Homeland Security to obtain 17 million CDL records. U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga further ordered DHS to return immediately any subpoenaed documents already obtained, and not to look at what it has.
Meanwhile, the Republican-controlled Senate is taking steps to restore the requirement that beef and pork be labeled with their country of origin so that consumers know what they are buying in grocery stores. This basic labeling requirement was eliminated in 2015 over the objection of Phyllis Schlafly and Midwestern ranchers.
On Thursday, August 6, the Senate Ag Committee voted 17-6 to insert mandatory country-of-origin labeling, known as MCOOL, into the pending farm bill. This is beneficial to America’s ranchers nationwide and enables all Americans to select the safer meat that is produced in our own country.
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organization with writing and policy work.