{"id":213689,"date":"2026-03-10T21:29:19","date_gmt":"2026-03-10T21:29:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/213689\/"},"modified":"2026-03-10T21:29:19","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T21:29:19","slug":"trumps-trucker-crackdown-will-drive-inflation-orange-county-register","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/213689\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s trucker crackdown will drive inflation \u2013 Orange County Register"},"content":{"rendered":"

Americans have become more reliant than ever on freight deliveries, with trucking volumes expected to increase significantly<\/a>. Nearly three-quarters of the nation\u2019s goods are moved by trucks, yet the industry is facing a dire shortage of truck drivers. Estimates peg that shortfall<\/a> up to 80,000 drivers \u2014 yet the Trump administration is removing thousands of qualified drivers from the roads.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s part of the Republican effort to crack down on immigration and immigrant labor. In the West, more than a third of drivers are immigrants \u2014 mostly Sikhs from India \u2014 and immigrants make up about 20% of the national trucking workforce.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now, the administration is forcing the California Department of Motor Vehicles to cancel the licenses of 13,000 immigrant drivers. DMV noted<\/a> that, \u201cAll the individuals \u2026 had been granted work authorization by the federal government and were legally present in the United States at the time their license was issued.\u201d But that\u2019s not enough to appease this administration.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The administration won\u2019t let the agency process these drivers\u2019 updated applications \u2014 and has threatened the state\u2019s transportation funds over the matter.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThese workers did everything the law required of them, yet they\u2019re the ones being punished for a bureaucratic failure they didn\u2019t create,\u201d attorney Katherine Zhao from the San Francisco\u2019s Asian Law Caucus told the San Francisco Chronicle<\/a>. \u201cThe state cannot rip away people\u2019s licenses first and figure out a fix later.\u201d<\/p>\n

This unnecessary crackdown is not only disrupting people\u2019s livelihoods<\/a>, but could further slow deliveries and drive up the cost of products that are delivered by tractor trailer. It\u2019s not just California, either. Per The Guardian<\/a>, ICE is \u201ctargeting truck stops, weigh stations and immigrant truckers as they drive behind the wheel\u201d throughout the Midwest.<\/p>\n

Federal officials cite road safety as their key concern after two tragic truck-related accidents involving immigrant drivers, but those concerns are based on anecdotes rather than evidence<\/a>. Taking qualified drivers off the road \u2014 and forcing a smaller pool of drivers to meet rising demand \u2014 strikes us as a more dangerous situation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As the great economist Thomas Sowell said, there are no solutions, there are only tradeoffs. The tradeoffs here do not justify the overzealous crackdown on immigrant truckers, but that\u2019s what we\u2019re seeing.<\/p>\n

Such efforts also are backed by some established trucking interests<\/a>, which argue that the immigrant drivers are driving down profits and wages. Making matters worse, some state legislatures are passing laws that would make it more difficult for automated trucks<\/a> to operate without a human driver, which is one way to pick up the slack.<\/p>\n

As a result, prices surely will rise for products delivered by truck, which is precisely the opposite of what Americans want after years of persistently high inflation have made life increasingly unaffordable.<\/p>\n

Once again, we see there\u2019s a price to pay for the administration\u2019s misguided fixation on immigration. And once again, we\u2019re seeing immigrants scapegoated for political point scoring. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Americans have become more reliant than ever on freight deliveries, with trucking volumes expected to increase significantly. Nearly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":213690,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[1965,131,133,132,975],"class_list":["post-213689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-long-beach","tag-editorials","tag-long-beach","tag-long-beach-headlines","tag-long-beach-news","tag-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213689\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}