Truck drivers are encountering a new risk on the highway: Law enforcement officers are empowered by the Trump administration to pull them off the road if they fail an English test.
The government argues the rules are critical to safety. For Vadym Shpak, they’re a costly and frustrating disruption.
Shpak, the owner of an Illinois-based trucking company, has had to book planes and car rentals for drivers who’ve had to abandon their rigs while on the road. Some of his employees, who are mostly Eastern European, refuse to go to southern states for fear of being targeted. He says his insurance premiums are climbing because of an increased number of violations.
“These are good drivers, experienced drivers, but they get pulled over and the officer says their English isn’t good enough,” he said. “And you know what happens? I have to pay for everything.”
The language crackdown is part of a broader Trump administration campaign that’s upending the trucking industry, a critical pillar of the US economy. In September, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sought to sharply limit commercial driver’s licenses for foreign-born applicants, a move since paused by a federal court. In recent months, hundreds of truckers have been swept up in Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids across Oklahoma, Texas, Indiana and New York.
What began as a push for highway safety has expanded into a far-reaching enforcement drive that immigrant advocates say indiscriminately targets foreign-born truckers who are legally permitted to be in the country. The Department of Transportation, tasked with ensuring safety and efficiency, has become a part of Trump’s broader immigration agenda — deepening uncertainty in an industry already mired in a slowdown marked by sluggish demand and low freight rates.
“There have been reports of areas where drivers are unwilling to go, and it generally is going to correspond to wherever ICE recently was,” said Aaron Graft, chief executive officer of Triumph Financial Inc., a banking platform for the freight industry. For days afterwards, trucking rates in those areas increase as the supply of drivers goes down, he said.
The trucking industry, which initially brushed off the possibility of major impacts, is now preparing for a sharp drop in the number of drivers. Shelley Simpson, CEO of freight shipping company JB Hunt Transport Services Inc., said at a recent conference that she’s expecting as many as 400,000 drivers — about 11% of the supply — to leave the business over the next few years because of enforcement actions, a number she has called “meaningful.”
Commercial truckers face stricter language requirements than regular drivers because their jobs require frequent communication and decision-making as they operate massive vehicles. Trucking experts agree that it’s critical for drivers to be able to interact and read road signs, with rules on language proficiency dating back decades. But since the Obama administration, violations typically only resulted in citations. That changed after an April executive order from President Donald Trump calling for “commonsense rules of the road” to be applied to US truckers.