A Republican Georgia congressman campaigning for one of the nation’s most fiercely contested U.S. Senate seats has pledged in social-media posts and interviews to improve road safety by stripping noncitizens of their commercial driver’s licenses.
“If you can’t read English road signs,” Rep. Mike Collins wrote on Facebook in April, “you don’t belong behind the wheel. Period.” Collins, who owns a trucking company and sits on the U.S. House transportation committee, has been one of the most vocal supporters of the Trump administration’s push to cancel the licenses of nearly 200,000 noncitizen commercial drivers, including thousands of truckers. The Trump administration has advanced the policy despite its own officials acknowledging a lack of empirical evidence linking foreign truckers to higher crash rates compared to American citizens. Meanwhile, Collins has resisted regulations that experts believe would genuinely lower the risk of serious accidents. Those regulations might have forced Collins’ family company to invest heavily in upgraded safety features for its trucks. Federal records, court documents, statements from plaintiffs’ lawyers and police reports show that over the last 25 years, accidents involving the firm’s drivers have killed five people and injured more than 50 others — among them a woman who now requires constant care because of a serious brain injury. Victims who were hurt in those collisions later alleged in lawsuits that the company’s truckers were responsible for hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills. The amount the company has disbursed remains undisclosed, as the settlements it reached with crash victims are confidential—a common practice in such lawsuits. Court documents from one lawsuit indicate that both sides consented to a $1 million settlement paid by the company’s insurance provider. Collins’ company rejected any claims of misconduct by its drivers or the business in those incidents. However, ProPublica’s review of federal motor vehicle records from the last two years reveals that Collins’ operation has a higher per-mile rate of unsafe driving and speeding infractions than most trucking firms with comparable mileage. The analysis further indicates that the company’s recent crash rate is near the median for comparable firms, yet the injury rate from those incidents ranks in the top 20%. Safety experts informed ProPublica that several technologies opposed by Collins—such as speed-limiting devices on semitrucks and automatic emergency-braking sensors on large rigs—lower the likelihood that crashes will result in severe injuries or fatalities.
