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Congress Turns Spotlight on Deadly Crashes Involving Illegal Immigrant Truckers

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill plan to examine how illegal immigrant truck drivers ended up on America’s roads following a string of devastating crashes, The Daily Wire has learned.

The House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability will hold a hearing Wednesday entitled, “Highway Safety Under Threat: Examining Non-Domiciled CDL [commercial driver’s license] Issuance to Illegal Aliens,” to investigate the now-frequent collisions.

The hearing comes after President Donald Trump mentioned the issue during his State of the Union speech Tuesday while honoring 7-year-old Dalilah Coleman, who was nearly killed in a collision allegedly caused by an Indian illegal immigrant allowed into the country by the Biden administration and who received a commercial driver’s license in California.

Since then, Republican Senator Jim Banks has introduced “The Dalilah Law,” which seeks to strip illegal immigrants of their commercial driver’s licenses and issue stricter requirements for issuing them.

“Granting commercial driver’s licenses to people who have violated our immigration laws, and in many cases, can’t read traffic signs in English, raises serious safety concerns. Tragically, we have seen the death or injury of innocent Americans due to this practice,” the subcommittee chairman, Republican Oklahoma Rep. Josh Brecheen, said in a statement to The Daily Wire.

“This is a matter of saving lives. Next week’s hearing will provide an important opportunity for local, state, and federal leaders to address this risk and work together to better protect American roads,” Brecheen added.

The upcoming hearing will feature testimony from Tim Tipton, the commissioner of the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety, and Sheriff Richard Del Toro Jr. of St. Lucie County, Florida.

The sheriff’s county was the site of a fatal trucking crash that thrust the issue into the national spotlight.

Harjinder Singh, an illegal immigrant from India, killed three people after making an illegal U-turn in St. Lucie County in August.

Singh was handed a commercial driver’s license in California after crossing the southern border illegally in 2018. It was later discovered that Singh failed his license test ten times in two months before he received it, Fox News previously reported.

Meanwhile, Tipton’s department has spearheaded operations in the state that have pulled illegal immigrant truckers off the roads.

In September, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, alongside Immigration and Customs Enforcement, caught 91 illegal immigrant truckers with commercial driver’s licenses.

During a two-day operation in October, state troopers caught 34 illegal immigrant truck drivers. The illegal immigrants had rap sheets that included assault and battery, soliciting prostitution, and DUI, according to ICE.

Two of them also had warrants for fraud and burglary overseas.

“Many of the illegal aliens arrested behind the wheel of an 80,000-pound tractor trailer can’t even read basic English, endangering everyone they encounter on the roads,” ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Executive Associate Director Marcos Charles said at the time.



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