Unqualified Truckers Are Killing American Families and Nobody Wants to Talk About It

You wouldn’t let someone fly a 737 from New York to Los Angeles if they couldn’t read the instrument panel or communicate with air traffic control. That’s common sense, right? So why are we allowing people who can’t read basic road signs to pilot 80,000-pound death machines down our interstates?

Mike Kucharski has been watching this disaster unfold from the inside. As co-owner and vice president of JKC Trucking in Illinois, he’s seen enough to know that what’s happening on American highways isn’t just dangerous. It’s madness. His words, not mine, though I couldn’t agree more.

The problem is simple but horrifying. Unqualified commercial truckers, many of them illegal immigrants who obtained their commercial driver’s licenses through fraudulent means, are sharing the road with school buses full of kids and families just trying to get home for dinner. When these drivers can’t read warning signs or communicate in English during an emergency, people die. And they have been dying.

Take Modou Ngom. Ohio officials revealed last week that this semi-truck driver, charged in a fiery interstate crash that killed an entire family of three, fraudulently obtained both his regular driver’s license and his CDL under a fake identity. He later secured U.S. citizenship the same way. The family he killed won’t be getting a second chance, but somehow Ngom managed to game the system multiple times.

Then there’s Bekzhan Beishekeev, an illegal alien who got his CDL from Pennsylvania. ICE arrested him in Indiana after he allegedly killed four people when his semi swerved into oncoming traffic and struck a van head-on. Four families destroyed because our system let someone behind the wheel of a commercial vehicle who had no business being there.

In Oregon, another illegal immigrant trucker named Rajinder Kumar stands accused of jackknifing his semi across both lanes, causing a crash that killed newlyweds. You know what haunts me about that one? These people just started their lives together. They survived the wedding planning, picked out china patterns, argued about where to spend Thanksgiving. And then some unqualified driver who shouldn’t have been on the road ended it all.

This isn’t about immigration politics, though the open borders crowd will try to make it about that. This is about basic competency and public safety. Federal law requires commercial drivers to demonstrate basic English comprehension. There’s a reason for that law. When you’re hauling cargo at 70 miles per hour and something goes wrong, you need to understand what other drivers are saying, what the signs mean, what the dispatcher is telling you.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton gets it. He just launched an investigation into several commercial driving schools in his state for allegedly endangering Texans by providing inadequate training, including to non-English speakers. These schools are violating both federal and state law, and Paxton isn’t playing games about it.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy isn’t either. His department has issued more than 550 notices of removal to what they’re calling sham CDL training schools across the country. These operations were cranking out licensed drivers the way diploma mills crank out degrees. The credentials look real, but the training behind them is worthless.

Kucharski says Duffy and Paxton are absolutely right to crack down hard. From his vantage point inside the trucking industry, he sees the carnage these fraudulent schools create. Every day, professional drivers who earned their CDLs legitimately share the highway with people who bought theirs from a school more interested in tuition payments than safety standards.

The free market works beautifully when everyone plays by the rules. But when you’ve got schools gaming the system, cutting corners, and graduating people who can’t meet basic safety requirements, that’s not capitalism. That’s fraud with a body count.

Limited government doesn’t mean no standards. It means smart standards, enforced fairly and consistently. Requiring commercial drivers to read English and demonstrate actual competency isn’t government overreach. It’s the bare minimum we owe to every parent putting their kid on a school bus, every commuter heading to work, every family taking a road trip.

The accidents keep happening. Kucharski points out that you can see them all the time if you’re paying attention. But most Americans aren’t paying attention until it’s their family member in the morgue, their spouse who didn’t come home, their child killed by someone who never should have been licensed in the first place.

We’ve created a system where it’s easier to get a fraudulent CDL than to get a legitimate one if you’re willing to pay the right crooked school. That’s backwards. That’s dangerous. And honestly, it’s insulting to every professional trucker who did the work, learned the skills, and earned their license the right way.

This madness has to stop. Not next year, not after another study, not after we form a committee to examine the issue. Now. The bodies are piling up, and every day we wait is another day some unqualified driver might kill someone you love.