Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy was basking in the spotlight over his crackdown on foreign truck drivers when a reporter pulled some inconvenient receipts from his own department.
President Donald Trump has long made undocumented truck drivers a target of his anti-immigrant rhetoric, casting them as a threat behind the wheel and claiming last month that they were “killing a lot of people.”
On Monday, Duffy took up the president’s cause, appearing before cameras in Detroit to announce that he was shutting down 110 truck driving schools, claiming a DOT analysis found 5,000 violations of federal safety standards requiring licensees to demonstrate English proficiency.
“If you’re here illegally and you can’t speak the language and you’re not well-trained, you don’t deserve to be in a big rig, driving American roads, endangering American citizens,” the Fox host-turned-transportation secretary said.
But Duffy’s press conference, which was attended by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullinin, was derailed when a reporter cited DOT data that poked holes in the crackdown.
“According to the U.S. Department of Transportation in 2025, only 17 foreign-born drivers holding immigrant or non-documented [commercial driver’s licenses] were responsible in fatal accidents,” the reporter said, as Duffy appeared to look down at his notes. “The slant here has been strongly about illegals, foreign drivers, but yet it accounts, according to U.S. DOT stats I see, for one percent of the issue.”
The reporter noted that a far higher share of drivers involved in fatal large-truck crashes did not have a commercial driver’s license. And Duffy’s actions have reduced the number of schools available to prepare drivers for the road.
Duffy, 54, brushed past the numbers and denied that his shutdown of the driving schools over English proficiency standards had much to do with immigrants.
“So for your DOT stats, the requirement that someone speak English as a commercial truck driver, that was not created by Trump 45 or Trump 47. It goes back decades,” he said. “You could have migrated to this country. You could have done it legally. But if you don’t speak English, you’re still violating our longstanding safety rules that you have to speak English. So this is not just about people who have come into the country illegally, which is a part of it.”
After Duffy stepped aside for Mullin, the DHS secretary took aim at the reporter for pointing out the data.
“Let me talk about that one percent. Are you saying one percent is OK? Because that one percent is what caused this right here,” Mullin said, pointing to a photo of an accident. “One percent is one too many. I said this in my remarks: Every single illegal that maims or kills an individual is 100 percent preventable. I’m trying to prevent every one of them.”
