President Trump announced this week that his administration is ramping up efforts to yank commercial driver's licenses from illegal immigrants operating tractor-trailers on American highways, because apparently we've been handing out CDLs like candy at a parade and hoping for the best.
As Conservative Brief reported, the announcement came during the Pennsylvania Defense and Innovation Summit in Carlisle, where Trump referenced the death of Pennsylvania State Trooper Michael Pahira Jr. The trooper was killed earlier this month while conducting a safety check along Interstate 81 in Schuylkill County when he was struck by a commercial truck driven by 33-year-old Michael Bon, a Haitian migrant who was in the country illegally and held a Massachusetts-issued CDL.
Let that sink in for a second. A guy who entered the country on July 2, 2024, during the Biden administration, who applied for Temporary Protected Status that was never approved, who was told by DHS last June that he needed to go back to Haiti, was still here driving an 80,000-pound vehicle with a license he never should have had. That is a system working exactly as poorly as you'd expect.
"My administration will soon take historic action to get illegal alien truck drivers off the roads who are just killing a lot of people," Trump said. "They can't read signs. Many of them are on drugs or alcohol, and they shouldn't be driving these things."
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, clearly feeling his moment, declared that the trucking industry has been operating "like the Wild, Wild, West, where anything goes and nobody asks any questions." He added, "The buck stops with me. American families should have confidence that our school bus and truck drivers are following every letter of the law and that starts with receiving proper training before getting behind the wheel."
The DOT announced back in February that it would inspect more than 550 truck driving schools nationwide for compliance with Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration standards. Fox News reporter Bill Melugin followed up this month with news that 75 of those schools are now being charged with fraud. According to Melugin, DHS and DOT identified 75 entry-level truck driver CDL schools suspected of "fraudulently helping non-citizen drivers qualify for CDLs." Some schools are allegedly falsifying training records, providing improper certifications, and failing to properly train drivers, per Breitbart News.
So to recap: sanctuary state policies let people who are here illegally get commercial licenses, shady schools rubber-stamped their training, nobody checked whether they could actually read road signs in English, and a state trooper paid the ultimate price. If you designed a system specifically to produce catastrophic outcomes, you'd be hard pressed to improve on this one.
The fact that it took a trooper's death to accelerate this crackdown tells you everything about how Washington operates. Better late than never, but let's not pretend this wasn't entirely predictable.
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