On Friday, the Austin Police Department and the attorney of Solomun Weldekeal Araya confirmed that the Eritrean national tested negative for drugs and alcohol after he crashed a semitruck on I-35 in the north part of the Texas capital, killing five people and injuring 11, the Austin American-Statesman reported.

At the time of the accident in mid-March, a bystander took a video of Araya struggling to comprehend English after the bystander scolded him that he killed people in the crash.

The story follows after the Biden administration in 2023 put into action an initiative to bolster the presence of "refugee communities" in trucking. From January 2021 to April 2022, the Transportation Department issued 876,000 commercial driver's licenses, effectively doubling the annual number of new drivers. According to  American Truckers United, a trucker advocacy group based out of Arkansas, crashes involving semitrucks to unassimilated migrants increased.

The group's website highlighted a stark increase in large truck crashes beginning in 2016 — the same year the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration under President Barack Obama issued the memo MC-ECE-2016-006, removing the "requirement to place drivers out of service for English Language Proficiency."

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