A legislative battle has been taking place recently in Little Rock, Arkansas, between two organizations in the same industry over an issue that has ramifications for all of North America, and President Donald Trump’s commitment to Make America Great Again.

On one side are representatives of small- and medium-sized trucking companies and the drivers they employ, and on the other, a state-level affiliate of one of America’s most powerful lobbying organizations, whose name doesn’t really tell the full tale of whose interests they represent. Though the fight in Little Rock is over a piece of state legislation, the issue being fought over has international ramifications, and is likewise of extreme import to the safety of the motoring public everywhere, as well as the wages of one of America’s largest groups of workers.

A recent tragedy in Austin, Texas, has brought the debate over these competing pieces of legislation in Arkansas into sharp relief.

On the night of Thursday, March 13, 2025, along interstate 35 in Austin, Texas, five people were killed and 11 sent to hospital when Solomun Weldekeal-Araya crashed the tractor trailer unit he was driving into stopped traffic. Amongst the dead were the entire López family—mother Natalia, father Sergio, and the children Lylah and little Diego, an infant. Araya was working for a subcontractor to Amazon, and, according to eyewitnesses, he did not slow down at all, and it took him colliding with 17 vehicles before the semi he was driving came to a stop.

Investigations into Araya reveal some disturbing resonances with many other incidents that have been taking place all across American (and Canadian) roads. Araya is a recent migrant from Ethiopia, only had his license for four months, and in that time had racked up a serious speeding ticket and a number of Hours of Service Violations. A viral video of Araya exiting his rig immediately after the crash suggested intoxication; although he was later cleared of being drunk or on drugs, the HOS violations indicate he may have been delirious from fatigue.

Though investigations are ongoing, there’s enough evidence here to suggest yet another in a pattern of horrific crashes we have seen in America—a recent migrant or refugee, legal or illegal, is involved in a collision which kills one or many people. It is later found that they either didn’t speak English, were not trained properly, had no work authorization, were involved in some kind of indentured servitude arrangement, or had already been deported multiple times.

Take the case of Ignacio Cruz-Mendoza, who crashed his truck in Colorado and, in losing the load of steel tubing from the flatbed he was pulling, instantly killed Scott Miller, 64, who coincidentally enough was a truck driver on his way home from work. Cruz-Mendoza was in the country illegally from Mexico, and had already been deported 16 times.

He has since been taken into custody by ICE after release from a very short 364 day sentence for this incident.

In 2021, two people were killed in Fort Worth, Texas, when Jean Marie Saint-Lot, a recent migrant from Haiti, ploughed into stopped traffic during winter weather. An investigation found the program of the CDL school he attended was only three weeks in duration, and taught him nothing about driving in inclement weather.

In another incident in Kentucky, a tow-truck driver named Troy Caldwell was killed by an immigrant trucker who was watching YouTube videos while he was driving down the road. The driver of the semi who killed Caldwell, Shodmon Yuldashev, is thought to be from Uzbekistan.

It is these incidents which have animated Shannon Everett, a co-founder of American Truckers United, who are the driving force behind a piece of legislation meant to address the problem of poorly trained drivers insourced to America from the third world.

“No one out there is standing up for the victims of these incidents,” Everett told me in a podcast interview, “and no one is standing up for America’s truckers, their safety on the roads, or their wages.”

Everett and his team have been compiling statistics on the issue of Commercial Drivers Licenses (CDLs), and their research ought to raise some questions about actions taken during the Obama and Biden administrations to create loopholes which make it easier to insource this labor and likewise easily give out CDLs, thus expanding the pool of drivers and artificially suppressing American truckers wages. And this follows decades of lobby groups like the American Trucking Association (ATA) begging the taxpayer to finance their own driver training programs over a claimed shortage that is not and has never been real.

During the Covid trucking demand spike in 2021, instead of letting the market operate as it should, which would have seen rates increase in response to bidding up of wages, the White House put out a very curious document, “The Biden Harris Administration Trucking Action Plan to Strengthen America’s Trucking Workforce.”

In this plan, the White House let slip what was really going on:

At the same time, the industry reports historic demand for its services. Reflecting that demand, wages for employed drivers in all trucking segments have increased 7-12% in the last year alone, but employment in some segments is still below pre-pandemic levels.

It is hard to ignore the implication here: The Biden administration, and no doubt many donors to the Democratic (and Republican) Party, were not happy that truck driver pay had increased.

The corporate welfare driven training programs favored by the ATA were not producing drivers fast enough to get rates under control, and it appears the Biden administration undertook an insourcing operation instead.

And so the government moved to lower the requirements for a CDL—or, as the White House phrased it, to expand “more seamless paths for veterans and underrepresented communities, such as women, to access good driving jobs.”

An April 2022 Fact Sheet update that has since been scrubbed from the White House website included a stunning figure that ought to have raised some eyebrows. Thanks to “cutting red tape,” the DOT enabled states to “more than double new commercial driver’s license issuances in January and February 2022 compared to January and February 2021. States have issued more than 876,000 CDLs since January 2021.”

Everett of ATU, and anyone who knows the industry very well, will tell you that this number is astronomical, and was not possibly achieved via existing training programs and CDL schools.

In 2016, in the waning days of the Obama administration, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) issued a memorandum that directed state DOT and other enforcement officials to not place “Out of Service” those drivers they found to be illiterate in English, despite the fact that this is a violation of federal language proficiency requirements to have a CDL and drive commercial trucks.

It is this curious chain of policy decisions that has lead Everett to take action in Arkansas by authoring House Bill 1569, which allows state enforcement of those waived English language proficiency requirements and does not allow for operation of a commercial vehicle with a license from any other country except Canada or Mexico, nor with a learner’s permit from any other country. You must have a proper CDL, with the training and skills testing inherent in getting one. ATU’s bill also prohibits commercial drivers from operating in the state on various visas, including B-1 and B-2, as those two types of visas have been found to be used by certain migrants when caught working for trucking companies who don’t want to employ locals, as seems to be the case with the company that employed Araya.

It is worth noting that Amazon, among others, seem to prefer these low cost and low quality carriers. In separate investigations by both CBS and the Wall Street Journal, it was found that these contractors, though low of cost to Amazon, impose high costs in ‘externalities’ on the motoring public, and these costs are often reckoned in lives—since 2015, such subcontractors have been involved in collisions that have killed 137 people.

Not long after Everett’s bill was filed in the State Capitol at Little Rock by Arkansas State Rep. Wayne Long, a separate, competing bill was filed by the Arkansas Trucking Association, HB1745, which uses some sneaky language, merely stating that a non-citizen driver must have some work authorization or EAD document, and a valid driver’s license from another country—on the assumption, no doubt, that whatever scribble that might be presented from Somalia or Ukraine is totally legitimate and that there are plenty of employees at the Arkansas DMV who can read those languages and contact those countries to confirm their legitimacy. There is also no control for English language proficiency contained in their bill.

In the many weeks since HB1569 was entered by Long, it has not yet got out of committee, but the ATA’s competing bill has already made it to the floor of the House for hearings. The vast majority of the testimony regarding the ATA’s HB1745 has been against the bill, and the single person to testify in favor of it was Shannon Newton, president of the Arkansas Trucking Association. In this testimony, when questioned about problems with all of these foreign drivers and the issue with English proficiency requirements, Newton punted, stating that this is a federal problem and not for the state to take on enforcing itself. Curiously, a watered down version of the English language requirement was later added to HB1745.

Per an official statement from the ATA regards ATU’s HB1659 Bill given to local television station KATV on March 14, “The ATA has publicly opposed HB 1569, emphasizing a preference for "solutions that are meaningful, enforceable, and withstand legal scrutiny without jeopardizing significant federal funding of our state’s infrastructure.”

One might ask where the feds stand on this, given the recent change in administration. In a public appearance at the Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville, Kentucky on March 27, recently appointed Chief Counsel of the FMCSA, Jesse Elison, told an audience that English proficiency was being enforced, and that the FMCSA has no jurisdiction to tell states anything about CDL standards, both of which are false.

Is the safety of America’s highways going to be left to corporate lobby groups who are happy to allow the status quo to continue benefitting their members who perpetuate the regime of cheap freight? A look at the donors behind the Arkansas Trucking Association gives you a who’s who of trucking’s biggest names, including WalMart, JB Hunt, and FedEx.

And on the other hand, are clueless bureaucrats, in their, well, cluelessness, to be trusted to halt the steady increase in fatalities stemming from truck involved collisions?

Trump and Vice President Vance have indicated that they are very concerned with the fate of the American working class, and have made many moves to bring production back to America, and in the past week, have generated an incredible amount of debate due to President Trump’s program of laying tariffs against a number of countries.

Another move they could make to help American workers is to close all of the loopholes being used to insource foreign labor here in what is a blatant wage suppression effort against one of America’s archetypal occupations. This recent influx of ‘drivers’ downstream of Biden’s ‘Action Plan’ have only made an existing situation worse; American truckers’ wages, by 2016, had dropped to 50 percent of what they were in 1980 in inflation adjusted dollars. 
It is no wonder that trucking has a retention problem. The Biden administration believed, and the American Trucking Association believes, that instead of fixing trucking’s problems and paying drivers more for their efforts, the U.S. should insource illiterates onto our roads instead. This gambit is killing innocent American motorists at an atrocious clip so that Jeff Bezos and his shareholders can extract ever more value from the working class.

We can’t let buck-passing bureaucratic sclerosis between states and the feds be used as an excuse to let this go on, especially when thousands of small to medium sized trucking companies in America have closed their doors and thousands of drivers have been laid off from their jobs.

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It is time for Trump to Make American Roads Safer Again by taking quick and decisive action to Make American Trucking Great Again. He must tell his recently appointed FMCSA head, Derek Barrs, that his first task is to overturn that memorandum waving English Proficiency Requirements for CDLs, and then have Barrs investigate what went on between Biden’s task force and those states who were debasing requirements to get a CDL. There are hundreds of thousands of dangerous foreign drivers on the road now, many brought here under dubious arrangements and often with the help of the same NGOs Trump has already gone to war against in his defunding spree with the DOGE. They should be identified; if they can’t be removed or deported, at the very least they ought to have their CDLs investigated and potentially cancelled.

Companies like Amazon have declared war on one of America’s most essential professions, the truck driver, and it behooves the Trump administration to close off one of those avenues by which America is bleeding itself to death with insourced labor.

Addendum: As this piece went to press, political pressure led to the withdrawal of HB1659 before it had ever got out of committee. This part of the story is developing, with the full story to be released at a later date.