Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is helping the trucking sector recover from the damaging flood of illegal migrant drivers invited by President Joe Biden’s policies.
“The reason there’s so much hope right now in our industry is because of the support from Secretary Duffy,” said Shannon Everett, the co-founder of American Truckers United.
That renewed hope will generate voters in 2026, Everett told Breitbart News:
You’re seeing that the American truck driver realizes that they can no longer sit on the sidelines, that they have to get engaged in the political sphere… I definitely believe that that’s going to that that’s going to convert into more engagement at the [2026] polls.
The trucking industry includes up to 8 million Americans nationwide.
Due to the support from Duffy, “The challenges that we continue to face are coming from the legislators and the federal agencies,” Everett said, adding that he and several other reformers in the trucking industry met with White House officials.
“I would say the administration is largely supporting the American Truck driver, and dealing with this problem that we’ve got of illegal aliens on highways,” he said.
Once in office, Duffy began shrinking Biden’s trucking disaster. In April, for example, he reinstated enforcement of a long-standing rule requiring drivers to be able to read and understand English. Since then, law enforcement has taken more than 7,000 foreign truckers off the nation’s highways.
Federal agencies and states are stepping up enforcement of the rules against foreign truckers passing through their jurisdictions.
Duffy is now threatening to withhold millions in funds from California’s government for improperly allowing illegal and unauthorized migrants to drive 18-wheelers on the highways.
Duffy has also rebuked the American Trucking Association (ATA) for its long-standing invented claim that a so-called “trucker shortage” has crippled the industry.
“This [claim] was concocted in a way to allow people to come into our country to get licenses, commercial driver’s licenses, unlawfully, and then get behind the wheel,” Duffy told a foreign reporter on October 30, adding:
I don’t think that’s the appropriate approach. We have a long history of great American truck drivers. Like our air traffic controllers or pilots, they take their jobs very seriously. What they do on American roads they think is of utmost importance, because it’s not just their lives, it’s the lives of the people around them on our highways and freeways that they’re concerned about every single day. Great professionals. So I think you’ll see American Truck drivers fill the space when we do what’s right and take out these unlawful [drivers].
“If you need more drivers, make the case, tell people how great the industry is, how much you can make in a year by driving a truck, and it will be met with, I think, the number of applicants we’ll need,” Duffy said.
That pressure has pushed the ATA to abandon the “trucker shortage” claim that was used to create and justify the flood of foreign drivers that has wrecked the industry’s economics, spiked roadway thefts, and killed people on the highways.
“ATA caves on driver shortage lie: hard pivot to ‘quality’ dodge, no apologies,” said the October 29 headline at FreightWaves.com, which reported:
For years, the American Trucking Associations (ATA) has relentlessly pushed the narrative of a catastrophic truck driver shortage — 60,000 positions unfilled, supply chains teetering on collapse — to manipulate policy and flood the market with cheap, underqualified labor. This fabricated crisis wasn’t about solving real problems; it was a tool to lower standards, suppress wages, and prioritize big carriers over safety and sustainability. But in a stunning reversal at their 2025 Management Conference, the ATA executed a hard pivot, ditching the blanket shortage claim and reframing it as a “shortage of quality drivers.” This isn’t an honest reckoning with their decades of misinformation — it’s a desperate goalpost shift to salvage credibility amid the wreckage they’ve caused, without ever admitting the original story was built on lies.
“There’s never been a lack of people with CDLs… what we lack is the number of qualified drivers who meet our high standards of professionalism and safety,” admitted Chris Spear, the ATA’s CEO, according to the report.
Professional American drivers will be more productive than Biden’s flood of migrants, Duffy argued:
If we’re able to take out the unlawful, untrained, non-English speaking drivers, we will not have an issue on our roadways, we will not have issues with our deliveries. Our products will move, but they’ll move safer because we have better drivers who are driving those big rigs, who have legal licenses and can actually speak the English language.
But Duffy also faces many more obstacles, including the judicial opposition to federal pressure on state regulators, and the concern that the quick removal of foreign drivers could jackknife many companies, such as USPS, during the Christmas season. Also, some House Republicans are backing a draft law that would allow a future President to provide CDLs to migrants.
Duffy is showing some skepticism toward the draft law.
The bill would “essentially codify the ability to issue non-domiciled CDLs to non-citizens,” said Everett, adding:
That is the whole reason that we have this problem is because they [Biden’s deputies] exploited the loophole that’s in the [prior agency] rules. The last thing we need [for Congress] to do is put the loophole in the law — and Duffy gets that.
Duffy “is just getting started,” said Everett, “He can only handle so much at one time.”
Advocates for American truckers say Biden’s pro-migration policies created a huge black market in the trucking sector by giving CDLs to a huge bulge of illegal and quasi-legal migrants.
On the West Coast, the trucking black market relies heavily on Sikhs from India. On the East Coast, the black market relies on visiting migrants from Eastern Europe. In many cases, the migrants pose as tourists to get through airport customs checks prior to several months of driving. American truckers refer to the East European migrant drivers as “Strong Solo Sergey,” Everett told Breitbart News.
The sham companies, foreign brokers, and migrant drivers in the black market face little oversight or regulatory enforcement from state regulators or insurance companies, said Everett. This regulatory vacuum allows them to snatch contracts from professional American drivers and established companies.
But the huge economic damage created by the black market becomes a public hazard when the migrants doze off while driving long hours and then smash into Americans at full speed, Everett said.
Insurance companies should change their rules to recognize the economic damage caused by the black market trucking industry, Everett said:
When you have one of these nefarious trucking companies, and they do that kind of damage, they just shut down and they disappear, and everybody’s left holding the bag. The way that [Transportation Secretary Sean] Duffy could curtail all of this is to ensure the real party is responsible for the crashes: The broker who gave that trucking company the load, which used a… [tourist visa] truck driver [to transport the cargo], should not be protected from civil liability.
Click here to read more Breitbart News articles about truckers.
