Are We Approaching The End Of The Road For America’s Truckers?

Earlier this year during President Donald Trump’s State of The Union address, he highlighted a little girl named Dalilah Coleman, for whom a new piece of legislation is named and is now before Congress.

Dalilah’s life was irrevocably changed when the car she and her mother were driving in was hit by a tractor trailer being driven by an illegal immigrant from India named Partap Singh. Dalilah spent weeks in a coma and without half of her skull for four months, and now suffers from diplegic cerebral palsy with normal cognitive development severely delayed.

Dalilah’s Law, amongst other items within it, seeks to enforce something which once seemed straightforward and common sense – that states should not be issuing Commercial Driver’s Licenses to illegal aliens.

Dalilah’s story, however, is but a piece of a much larger series of tragedies playing out throughout America.

Until August of 2025, when shocking dash cam footage went viral showing an illegal immigrant from India pulling a U-turn on the Florida turnpike and killing 3 people, the media had largely been ignoring this growing problem on our highways. That incident in Florida, however, changed the game, and combined with the story of Dalilah Coleman, two entire families being killed in two separate incidents in Texas also involving illiterate and untrained migrants, the mainstream is now paying attention.

CBS has conducted its own investigations into what is going on here, including a multi part series at 60 Minutes on a dangerous carrier operated by Serbian gangsters in Chicago, and a look into the industry of load brokering, the intermediaries between shippers and trucking companies and what role they have to play in failing to screen bad actors out of the business.

There is also a case on this question before the Supreme Court right now called Montgomery vs. Caribe, which should be seeing a ruling in June.

Many of these media pieces fail to ask how the trucking industry arrived here. What caused the American Trucking industry to fall prey to such a lowering of safety standards and flooding of our roads with so many dangerous drivers?

At first glance it looks to be a confluence of corporate greed and problems with mass migration; however, the story is much deeper, and I have written a book explaining how we got here called “End Of The Road – Inside The War on Truckers.”

Before the trucking industry began leveraging newly arrived migrant labor to undercut American truckers and put them out of business the industry was already using a number of methods to suppress driver wages, the most infamous of which was the “driver shortage narrative.”

As I outline in chapter four of the book, “Welfare on Wheels,” a corporate lobby group called the American Trucking Associations, which represents very large trucking companies often referred to as MegaCarriers, began circulating an idea into the public called the “driver shortage” back in 1987.

This idea has remained pervasive and unchallenged for decades while it has misconstrued a real problem the industry has, which is keeping drivers around while consistently underpaying them and treating them as disposable. The driver shortage narrative has been used to unlock state and federal monies for truck driver training schools, often owned by members of the ATA. These government handouts for CDL training were used to undergird the retention problem, which remains unsolved, and is now held up by third world labor instead.

The constant churn of new drivers through the industry brought with it the problems one would expect with so many new and inexperienced operators behind the wheel, including unnecessary collisions and high insurance costs. Instead of retaining skilled and competent drivers, industry and government chose to micro-manage and over-regulate truckers instead, with all sorts of privacy invading surveillance technology mandated by the Feds, including Electronic Logging Devices.

The ELD mandate, which went into effect in 2017, later came to be part of trucking’s undoing, as many of the companies who employ so much insourced and often illegal labor have used backdoors into ELD systems, where those companies erase the service hours of their drivers and force them to work far in excess of legally allowed driving time. American truckers, who won’t be pushed around like that, are outcompeted by indentured servants chained to steering wheels.

Throughout thirteen chapters of the book, I show example after example of how the race to the bottom on our interstates results in a fundamentally anti-human approach to dealing with the real people who drive our economy, including a chapter that looks into how autonomous robot trucks are being advertised as a safer alternative to human truckers.

In what should surprise no one, the pimps of autonomous vehicles, like everyone else in the industry, are twisting and misinforming the public and lawmakers in an effort to make money by punishing truckers instead of honoring their hard work and sacrifice.

There are roughly 2 to 2.5 million trucking jobs and the industry employs about 8 million people in total. Before we allow truckers to be replaced by robots, we should be asking why government and corporation have debased the job so much that before the robots get here, American truckers are being actively replaced with untrained and dangerous insourced labor.

Why are large trucking companies not held to their own free market rhetoric when it comes to the price of labor?

Why are they not told to fix their own retention problem?

Why must they offload the costs of their own lack of care for their employees onto the rest of society?

Gord Magill is a lifelong trucker who now writes about truckers and the industry across numerous publications and platforms. His new book “End Of The Road – Inside The War on Truckers” is available from Creed and Culture.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.