Earlier this year, during President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, he mentioned a young girl named Dalilah Coleman, who is now associated with new legislation before Congress.
Dalilah’s life was forever altered when an illegal immigrant from India, named Partap Singh, collided with the car she was in with her mother. Dalilah endured weeks in a coma and went without half of her skull for four months. She now faces diplegic cerebral palsy, along with significantly delayed cognitive development.
The legislation, known as Dalilah’s Law, aims to implement something that seems fairly straightforward—prohibiting states from issuing Commercial Driver’s Licenses to undocumented immigrants.
Dalilah’s situation, however, reflects a much broader pattern of tragedies occurring across the U.S.
Before August 2025, when disturbing dashcam footage went viral of an illegal immigrant making a U-turn on a Florida turnpike and killing three people, the media largely overlooked the troubling issues plaguing American highways. That Florida incident changed the narrative. When combined with Dalilah’s story—alongside two separate incidents in Texas that involved untrained migrants resulting in death—the mainstream media began to take notice.
CBS has been conducting investigations, including a recent multi-part series on 60 Minutes that examined a dangerous carrier run by Serbian criminals in Chicago and explored the load brokering industry, which connects shippers and trucking companies, and their role in failing to properly vet dangerous operators.
Additionally, there is a significant case currently before the Supreme Court called Montgomery vs. Caribe, which is expected to have a ruling in June.
Many of these media pieces, however, miss a crucial question: how did the trucking industry end up in such a precarious position? What led to safety standards deteriorating and a rise in risky drivers on our roads?
Initially, it appears to stem from a combination of corporate greed and migration issues. Yet, the situation is much more complex, and there’s a book detailing this decline titled “End Of The Road – Inside The War on Truckers.”
Before the industry began employing newly arrived migrant labor to undercut American truckers, it was already implementing various strategies to suppress driver wages, the most notorious being the “driver shortage narrative.” Since 1987, a corporate lobby group known as the American Trucking Associations began promoting the idea of a driver shortage.
This notion has persisted unchallenged for decades, often masking a genuine issue: keeping drivers while consistently underpaying them and treating them as disposable. This driver shortage narrative has facilitated access to state and federal funding for truck driver training schools, frequently owned by ATA members. Such government support has only perpetuated the industry’s retention problems, which still remain unresolved, now overshadowed by lower-wage labor.
The constant influx of inexperienced drivers has consequently led to the expected problems—accidents and increased insurance costs. Instead of maintaining skilled drivers, the industry opted for micro-management and over-regulation, with the introduction of invasive surveillance technologies like Electronic Logging Devices mandated by the government.
The ELD mandate, established in 2017, became part of trucking’s difficulties. Many companies employing insourced and sometimes illegal labor have exploited loopholes in ELD systems, manipulating drivers’ service hours and compelling them to work beyond legal limits. Skilled American truckers, who resist such treatment, are outmatched by workers bound to their positions.
Across thirteen chapters of the book, multiple examples illustrate how this downward spiral on highways results in an inhumane approach to the very individuals fueling the economy. One chapter even discusses how autonomous trucks are presented as safer alternatives to human drivers.
Not surprisingly, advocates for autonomous vehicles, like many in the industry, are misleading the public and lawmakers for profit while undervaluing the hard work of truckers.
With approximately 2 to 2.5 million trucking jobs and a total of about 8 million people employed in the industry, it raises an important question: before we replace truckers with robots, why have government and corporations devalued this profession to the point that American truckers are being actively substituted with untrained, dangerous labor?
Why do large trucking companies evade the consequences of their free-market rhetoric regarding labor costs?
Why are they not compelled to address their retention challenges?
Why do they shift the effects of their negligence onto society?
