Homeland Scurity Working for Highway Safety

Homeland Scurity Working for Highway Safety

Written by David E. Smith

It is gratifying to see federal agencies finally working with resolve to secure our highways. By targeting widespread fraud in the commercial trucking industry—specifically illicit testing schemes and unqualified foreign drivers—the administration is taking long-overdue action to protect American lives.

A primary concern for many citizens is the lack of English proficiency among commercial operators. Language is not merely a formality; it is a safety necessity. Drivers must be able to converse with the public, read highway signs, and respond to official inquiries. The failure to enforce these standards has deadly consequences, a lesson our nation learned in the 1994 tragedy involving the Willis family.

As ABC Chicago News reported at the time:

Chicago minister Scott Willis, his wife, Janet, and their six youngest children were driving to Milwaukee to visit relatives. Their van hit debris from a truck and exploded. It was destroyed by flames. The six Willis children died. Their parents were badly burned.

The driver of the truck that dropped the debris had an Illinois commercial driver’s license. Now there are questions about how that driver obtained the CDL license, and, in general, how commercial drivers licenses were obtained throughout most of this decade.

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Authorities identified the man, 33-year-old Ricardo Guzman, as the driver of the truck that dropped the debris, puncturing the van’s gas tank.

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According to this police report, when Wisconsin state troopers tried to question Guzman he claimed he could not speak English and needed his brother to translate.

To make matters worse, the Chicago Tribune reported that Guzman not only could not speak English, but he ignored warning of other drivers.There are good reasons why the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Act requires commercial motor vehicle drivers to read and speak English sufficiently to converse with the general public, understand highway traffic signs and signals in English, respond to official inquiries and fill out mandatory reports.

The danger has only grown as “sanctuary states” like Illinois and California facilitate the integration of illegal aliens into our critical infrastructure. Earlier this year, a federal audit of Illinois’ non-domiciled CDL program revealed that nearly 20% of these licenses were issued illegally. We must remember that Illinois’ vulnerability to such policies was cemented in 2017 when then-Governor Bruce Rauner signed the TRUST Act into law – making Illinois a “sanctuary state,” signaling that political pandering would take precedence over immigration enforcement.

Federal Crackdown

Earlier this week, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the formation of “Joint Task Force Crossroads of America,” an initiative uniting the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of Transportation (DOT), and the Department of Justice (DOJ). The task force was established to dismantle organized fraud rings, hold corrupt testing academies accountable, and remove illegal alien commercial drivers from the nation’s interstate system.

Watch their press conference:

From this press conference and press release we learn that this coordinated campaign has already produced immediate enforcement actions:

Training School Shutdowns: DOT issued emergency orders removing 110 commercial driver’s license (CDL) schools tied to more than 5,000 drivers who failed basic English language proficiency standards.

Targeted Raids: Federal agents conducted a synchronized, single-day sweep hitting over 200 commercial driving schools across 23 states.

Arrests and Detentions: Coordinated field actions by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), and state law enforcement have rapidly resulted in dozens of immigration detentions alongside dozens of immediate out-of-service violations for English proficiency failures.

National Audits: Regulators initiated a 40-state investigation and nationwide audit of third-party CDL skills testers to identify systemic loopholes exploited by unlawful networks.

State politicians and bureaucrats should face serious federal consequences—and even jail time—if they knowingly grant interstate driving privileges to individuals who are unlawfully present in our country. This is especially true when officials issue commercial driver’s licenses to unqualified applicants whom they know have failed federal English-proficiency requirements, cannot understand highway warning signs, or cannot safely operate an 80,000-pound vehicle.

As a father with four adult children regularly traveling our highways, this crackdown is deeply personal. My wife and I, like countless other parents, recognize that reckless “sanctuary” policies place our families at greater risk to advance a radical open-border agenda.

The human cost of this negligence can be catastrophic. We see it in the case of Dalilah Coleman, who was critically injured in a 2024 California collision involving an allegedly unqualified illegal immigrant. Here in Illinois, 17-year-old Denny Valentini and Vincent Petrella tragically lost their lives in separate collisions in 2013 and 2014.

Similar tragedies will continue as long as state motor-vehicle agencies prioritize open-border politics over the basic safety of American citizens. The Joint Task Force is a necessary step, but the ultimate solution requires ending the policies that allow unqualified foreign nationals access to our nation’s transportation infrastructure. We must prioritize the safety of our families and posterity over the convenience of those who have no legal right to be here.