American roadways have become substantially more hazardous in recent years thanks in part to an explosion of unqualified, unvetted foreign drivers with dubious immigration statuses operating tractor-trailers and other commercial vehicles.
The growing issue has finally garnered national attention following a series of catastrophic wrecks across the country, including a crash that claimed five lives (including those of an infant and a child) this month in Austin, TX.
Solomun Weldekeal Araya, a 37-year-old migrant from the Horn of Africa who speaks little English, was arrested and charged with multiple counts of intoxication manslaughter after the 18-wheeler he was driving slammed into 17 other vehicles in stopped traffic on Interstate 35, authorities say.
Shannon Everett and his team at American Truckers United (ATU) are working tirelessly to uncover dirty secrets of the industry and bring them to the attention of state and federal authorities, who are often complicit in flooding our roads with dangerous foreign operators.
“When we first started working on this, we had a deep understanding and knowledge of what was taking place with Mexico and Canada and the loopholes that were being abused to bring foreign commercial driver’s licenses onto American roadways,” Everett told Border Hawk in a new interview.
“What we WEREN’T familiar with was what we’ve now discovered and what everybody is seeing in the Austin crash, and that is U.S.-licensed drivers who are not citizens, who have been able to obtain a U.S. commercial driver’s license, being involved in these accidents.”
Everett explained that many foreign big rig drivers are now being issued “non-domicile commercial learner’s permits” (CLP) and “non-domicile commercial driver’s license” (CDL) – a category of authorization of which he was totally unaware until this year.
Everett said he has hired and worked with thousands of drivers and never come across such documentation, nor have his partners or colleagues in the industry.
In 2019, the American Trucking Associations lobbied the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to remove specific ‘ambiguous language’ to enable a much wider swathe of foreign workers to access non-domicile CLPs and CDLs, Everett explained.
These non-domicile CLPs and CDLs are only available to citizens of countries outside the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and can be obtained by aliens who do not have permanent status in the U.S., such as ‘asylum seekers’ who were ushered into the country via Biden-era parole programs that enabled ‘migrants’ to obtain work authorization.
Everett says many whistleblowers have informed ATU that a disturbingly large number of new CDLs and CLPs are now being issued to ‘refugees’ and ‘migrants,’ many of whom have little to no training and don’t speak English.
“We have seen a radical shift in the trucking industry, and what everybody is experiencing out on the highways is a result of a significant policy change that happened in the last several years,” Everett stated.
Implementation of new regulations and policies coupled with constant improvements in technology and driver assistance should have made commercial driving safer than ever, but the “trucking industry is the most dangerous it’s ever been.”
“It’s because there is one standard for the American truck driver and another standard for this new ecosystem of foreign truck drivers,” Everett said.
“What they’re doing is they’re completely destroying all the hard work that the whole industry has worked on for the last 30 or 40 years to make our highways safer in the name of political correctness or whatever agenda they have, and people’s lives are being ruined.”