On Wednesday, September 9, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin launched a new federal tip line. It is run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and it asks Americans to report any truck driver they suspect of being in the country illegally.
Not a driver they saw driving dangerously. A driver they suspect.
Mullin's justification was this:
"Too many American lives have been lost or permanently changed because illegal aliens who have no business being on our roads have been granted CDLs."
The federal government's own data does not support that. As The Washington Sun reported, federal figures do not show that noncitizen commercial drivers cause a disproportionate share of fatal crashes, and the Transportation Department has said outright that there is not enough data to establish a relationship between immigrant truckers and fatal crashes.
The count at the hearing he chaired
On March 4, 2026, Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma chaired a House Homeland Security subcommittee hearing called "Highway Safety Under Threat: Examining Non-Domiciled CDL Issuance to Illegal Aliens."
His opening statement carried the number the administration has leaned on ever since: "In 2025 alone, at least 17 fatal crashes resulting in 30 deaths were caused by illegal aliens driving commercial vehicles with CDLs."
Seventeen. That is the federal count, and it is worth knowing how the government reached it. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration went through the fatal truck crashes of 2025 one at a time, checked each driver against state licensing agencies, and asked Homeland Security about each one's immigration category. Wendy Liu, an attorney with the Public Citizen Litigation Group, described the result to the subcommittee: the agency "perused a list of thousands of fatal crashes involving trucks in 2025, and identified only 17 with a 'substantial likelihood' of involving a driver with a non-domiciled commercial driver's license."
Then she supplied the denominator Brecheen's statement did not. "The most recent publicly-available statistics show that there were approximately 4,000 fatal large truck and bus crashes involving drivers with commercial driver's licenses in 2023," her written testimony reads. "So, the 17 crashes that FMCSA has identified comprises less than 1 percent of crashes involving people with commercial driver's licenses."
Out loud, she turned it around: "over 99 percent of fatal crashes are caused by U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents according to the Department of Transportation's own data."
That answer was given at Brecheen's own hearing, on the record, in front of him. The crackdown went ahead anyway, and six months later it produced a tip line — pointed at immigration status, which is not where the other 99 percent is.
Liu also disputed the premise the tip line rests on. "Under current law, no undocumented person, no illegal alien can hold a commercial driver's license," she testified. "Every DACA recipient, asylee, asylum seeker, person with temporary protected status, or refugee who holds a non-domiciled commercial driver's license has been issued a work permit by the Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services authorizing that person to work in the United States."
Brecheen's use of numbers has come up here before. He told a town hall that the Tax Foundation said his constituents were "$1,700 per year better off," when the Tax Foundation's actual finding was that Trump's tariffs cost the average household $840 a year.
What has already happened to 200,000 drivers
The tip line is not the beginning of this. It is the enforcement arm of something that already cost people their jobs.
In March, roughly 200,000 truck drivers began losing their commercial licenses after the Department of Homeland Security announced that asylum seekers, refugees and recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program would no longer be eligible to get or renew a commercial driver's license. A CDL is what you need to drive a semi, a tractor-trailer or a bus.
These are people who passed the test, held the license, and were driving legally in the United States. The rule change did not find them unsafe. It found them ineligible.
The administration has been working this angle from more than one direction. It also shut down 110 truck driving schools over an English-language rule — training programs, closed, in an industry that has spent years saying it cannot find enough drivers.
Who is objecting
The groups pushing back against the crackdown are civil rights organizations, several of them representing communities that will absorb the suspicion this tip line invites. A coalition that filed in court in July included the Sikh Coalition, the Asian Law Caucus, United Sikhs, Stop AAPI Hate and Truckers Movement for Justice.
Their objection is specific. The administration is using immigration status as a stand-in for safety, and the policy has exposed immigrant drivers to more commercial-vehicle inspections, which they called "a pretext for immigration arrests." A tip line asking the public to report drivers they suspect points the same mechanism at the general public.
That is the mechanism. A tip line has no way to check whether a report is accurate before it becomes a stop.
Why this reaches your grocery bill
Almost everything in an American store arrived on a truck. Pulling 200,000 licensed drivers off the road, closing the schools that would replace them, and making the remaining drivers a target for anonymous reports is not a plan that lowers the cost of anything.
The safety case for it, in the government's own count, is 17 crashes against roughly 4,000 fatal large truck and bus crashes a year — less than 1 percent.
The short version
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin opened an ICE tip line on September 9 asking Americans to report truck drivers they suspect of being undocumented, though the Transportation Department says there is not enough data to link immigrant truckers to fatal crashes. At the March 4 hearing Rep. Josh Brecheen chaired, he put the federal count at "at least 17 fatal crashes resulting in 30 deaths" in 2025; a Public Citizen attorney testified at the same hearing that this is less than 1 percent of the roughly 4,000 fatal large truck and bus crashes involving licensed commercial drivers in a year. Some 200,000 drivers already began losing their commercial licenses in March under a separate eligibility change, and 110 truck driving schools have been shut down.
Sources
The Washington Sun, ICE Opens a Tip Line to Report Undocumented Truck Drivers, by Gavin J. Quinton, September 9, 2026. Photo: Yuki Iwamura/AP.
House Committee on Homeland Security, Highway Safety Under Threat: Examining Non-Domiciled CDL Issuance to Illegal Aliens — hearing transcript, March 4, 2026, including the written and oral testimony of Wendy Liu of the Public Citizen Litigation Group.
Rep. Josh Brecheen, "This Tragedy Should Never Have Happened": opening statement, House Committee on Homeland Security, March 4, 2026.
