The Department of Transportation (DOT) and Trump administration are "paying attention" and finally "cleaning up" the commercial trucking industry, says Lewie Pugh, executive vice president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association and a truck driver himself.
"Thankfully, DOT and [Transportation Sec. Sean] Duffy and the Trump administration are paying attention to what our organization and what my members — who are the men and women out there on the highway every day making a living — have been saying for the last few years: We've got to clean this up," Pugh told Newsmax Thursday.
"There's all these people out here driving trucks that shouldn't be behind the wheel," he said on "National Report." "Who's giving them licenses?"
"Where are they coming from? Who's training them?"
"And none of these things have been answered. But thankfully, someone's paying attention, and we're starting to get these people off the road slowly and incrementally," added Pugh.
Duffy on Wednesday said the California Department of Motor Vehicles revoked 17,000 non-domiciled commercial driver's licenses he says were issued illegally to undocumented citizens.
"After weeks of claiming they did nothing wrong, [Gov.] Gavin Newsom and California have been caught red-handed. Now that we've exposed their lies, 17,000 illegally issued trucking licenses are being revoked," Duffy said in a press release.
"This is just the tip of the iceberg. My team will continue to force California to prove they have removed every illegal immigrant from behind the wheel of semitrucks and school buses," he added.
The move comes after a fatal crash on Florida's turnpike this past summer killed three people. The driver, Harjinder Singh, made an illegal U-turn leading to the deadly wreck.
According to the DOT, Singh was issued a non-domiciled commercial driver's license out of California but was not proficient in English and failed roadway signage tests.
"These folks are having accidents and doing very bad things. And I mean, unfortunately, this has been a growing problem for years in the trucking industry," Pugh said.
"I'm not an immigration expert. I don't know whether these licenses were right or wrong, how that plays out."
"What I do know is we have a huge problem in trucking, and that starts with training because for years and years and years, we've been legislating and regulating from this whole fake driver-shortage narrative," he explained.
"There isn't a driver shortage. There never has been."
"And by doing that, we've shortcut training; we've shortcut highway safety; we've shortcut driver pay, all these things. And that's why we have these folks coming into the industry who aren't properly trained, aren't properly vetted," Pugh added.
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