Nick Freitas: The hidden powers feeding America’s immigration machine



The debate over immigration is usually framed around border security, asylum claims, and deportations — but another question deserves attention.

Who benefits from it?

Homeland security policy veteran Lora Ries tells BlazeTV host Nick Freitas that the worst of border security began under the Biden administration, and it got worse with the help of Secretary Mayorkas, who “gave a parole program to Venezuelans, to Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Ukrainians, Afghan evacuees” and “gave them all work authorization.”

“The states would sue, and he would try to, with a straight face, say, 'Yes, it’s on a case-by-case basis,' which was ridiculous,” she explains. “And so fortunately, President Trump has rolled those back.”


Freitas points out that “the biggest question” is who really benefits from this.

“One of the things I’ve realized is there is huge money in the NGO world and the nonprofit world to help with refugees, illegal immigrants,” he says.

“It’s become yet another industrial complex,” Ries agrees.

“Hundreds of billions of dollars through multiple departments. And so it’s not, you know, it’s harder to track whether it's grants going out through the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, Health and Human Services is a big one, State Department, you name it,” she explains.

“Are these also the NGOs and groups that will go and coach migrants on what to say?” Freitas asks.

“Yes,” she answers.

He then presses, “Do they also coach on them avoiding the law when it comes to getting deported?”

“Yes," she answers again. “Don’t answer the door, you know, that sort of thing.”

“So you’ve got the NGOs, they’re obviously incentivized to perpetuate mass migration, illegal immigration, all of it,” Freitas says, before pointing out that DOGE began pointing out all the “waste” in tax payer dollars that went to this.

“That’s not waste. That is one political party taking your tax dollars and allocating it to ideologically friendly NGOs, 501 C3s, whatever it was, nonprofits, and you know, they’re getting campaign contributions on the other end, not from the organizations, but from the people inside them,” he explains.

“You can tell how that grift is working,” he adds.

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Jack Smith Seized Nearly 5,000 Checks Written By Trump Donors

Special Counsel Jack Smith seized nearly 5,000 personal checks written by donors to President Donald Trump, according to new whistleblower disclosures. Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, released the bombshell findings during a Tuesday hearing featuring testimony from Smith about his lawfare against Trump. The information was disclosed via legally protected whistleblower disclosures. According […]

Harvard Turns to Biden, Obama Lawyers To Fend Off Race-Blind Admissions Enforcement

BOSTON—Harvard is turning to Biden administration lawyers to defend itself from the Trump administration's efforts to make sure that the university has ended race-based discrimination in admissions.

The post Harvard Turns to Biden, Obama Lawyers To Fend Off Race-Blind Admissions Enforcement appeared first on .

For The Left, There Is No Republican Too Moderate To Target With Lawfare

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, has earned a reputation as one of the Senate’s most bipartisan and moderate members. But not even that willingness to work across the aisle spared the longtime senator from being ensnared by the left’s lawfare machine. Leftist propaganda outlet ProPublica dropped a hit piece on Tuesday suggesting Collins and her 2020 […]

The real reason everything is expensive and what you can do



Joe Biden has been out of office for almost two years now — so why does everything still feel so expensive?

As midterm elections draw nearer, that’s the question on the top of American minds, and BlazeTV host Ron Simmons has some answers.

While prices are up, Simmons points out that this all began under Biden, where “prices rose about 21%.”

“That’s over 5% a year. And since that time, since the second administration of President Trump, they’ve grown a little over 2% a year, about 2.5% a year,” he explains.


“When prices grew to 21%, so if something cost a dollar and then when Biden left it cost a $1.20, it didn’t go back down to a dollar when President Trump got elected,” he says.

“What he has done, and his administration have done, is they’ve just reduced how fast it’s increasing,” he adds.

Simmons explains that prices will go down when demand goes down.

“If you remember back to 2008, 2009, when they had the huge housing crisis, well, in 2007, do you know what interest rates were for mortgages at that time? Guess what they were. They’re right what they are right now, a little over 6%,” he explains.

“People lost their jobs and things, and there was more supply than there was demand,” he continues. “So they dropped interest rates and they brought interest rates down, probably too low, honestly — artificially low — and so you could buy a house at a 3% mortgage.”

“Then when the economy got better, and the fact that we pumped a lot of unnecessary money into the economy, interest rates went up because there ended up being more demand than there was supply,” he adds.

When the demand is high, the interest rates remain high.

“Now, what we don’t want to happen is another huge recession, obviously, but just remember how this happened,” he says, pointing out that Democrat policies have led us here.

“Housing has become dramatically more expensive during the Biden years,” he continues, noting that the Heritage Foundation has reported that the cost of financing a medium-priced home has risen 114% since 2021.

“At the same time, consumer prices have risen about 20%, which we talked about, and it costs about $13,300 more per year to purchase the same house, interest-rate-wise, than it did in 2021,” he says.

“Immigration was a part of this,” he explains. “When they opened the floodgates, more people coming into the country means there’s more demand for goods and services, and that increased the cost of living and housing.”

However, Simmons points out that the most expensive cities — San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, New York, and Boston — are all run by Democrats.

“So just remember when you’re voting this time,” he adds.

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Abdul El-Sayed Gives Big Hug at Swanky Fundraiser to 7-Eleven Operator Sued by the Feds for Stiffing His Workers, 'Wage Theft'

A grinning and gladhanding Abdul El-Sayed attended a swanky fundraiser this month hosted by a Pakistani-American 7-Eleven franchisee whom the Biden administration sued for withholding overtime pay from his employees.

The post Abdul El-Sayed Gives Big Hug at Swanky Fundraiser to 7-Eleven Operator Sued by the Feds for Stiffing His Workers, 'Wage Theft' appeared first on .

For years, the government tried to prove Google should be broken up. There's finally a verdict.



Throughout the Biden administration, Google was locked in two antitrust cases — one over its search engine dominance and another for its digital advertising business. For remedies, Google was at risk of divesting some of its most prized products, including Chrome and Google Ads. However, a new decision will let Google keep its toys in the end.

To understand the scope of this story, we have to go back to October 2020 when the first complaint was filed by the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. The document accused Google of a Sherman Act violation — the bill that bans monopolistic practices — and ultimately aimed to bring action against the tech giant for “unlawfully maintaining monopolies in the markets for general search services, search advertising, and general search text advertising in the United States.”

Google risked divesting several of its major products and services.

The case would ultimately go to trial in late 2023 with Obama-appointed District Judge Amit Mehta presiding, but not before a second antitrust case tried to bring Google to its knees once more.

In early 2023, another complaint was filed, this time aimed directly at Google’s online ad business. It claimed that the company:

  • Monopolized the ad server market, which is the software that website publishers use to manage the ads on their websites.
  • Monopolized or attempted to monopolize the ad exchange market, which is a digital auction where publishers sell ad space to advertisers.
  • Monopolized the advertiser ad network market, which is a system that gathers up available ad space from multiple publishers to sell to advertisers.
  • Was complicit in unlawful tying, where a company uses its dominance with one product to coerce users to adopt another product under the guise that their pairing is necessary to make the system of platform work as intended.
  • Brought monetary damages upon the United States.

RELATED: Google's AI overhaul of Search will overfish the internet to extinction

bgblue/Getty Images

The collective charges from both cases resulted in multi-year trials, each with major repercussions mounting for the tech giant. At one point, Google risked divesting several of its major products and services, including the Google Chrome browser, the Android mobile operating system, and Google Ads. And somehow, bit by bit, Google clawed its way out of total calamity.

In September 2025, District Judge Mehta ruled that Google would not have to sell Chrome or Android. However, the company was still found guilty in that it “harmed Google’s publishing customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web,” according to a press release. To atone, Google was forced to:

  • End bundled contracts, where Google forced OEMs and partners to include Google apps on their devices in exchange for Google Play Store support.
  • Disclose web search index data with rivals for a small fee, excluding trade secrets and intellectual property.
  • Allow rivals to rent Google search results, maps, and other services on their websites with tapered plans that diminished over the next five years.
  • Provide a five-year license to competitors to use Google’s search ad network.
  • Submit to a five-member watchdog group to ensure all remedies were met for six years.

Things were looking up for Google, but it wasn’t out of the woods yet. The second case was still underway, and after Clinton-nominated District Judge Leonie Brinkema found the company guilty again, a new batch of devastating remedies were on the table. This time, Google risked having to:

  • Sell its Google Ads business, including Google AdX (aka: Google Ad Exchange) and Google DFP (aka: DoubleClick for Publishers), formerly known as Google Ads Manager.
  • Discontinue tying practices for a minimum of 10 years.
  • Put 50% of Google Ads (AdX and DFP) profits into a locked escrow account from April 17, 2025, until the Google Ads sale is complete.
  • Refrain from using data collected through Google services — like YouTube, Gmail, Search, Chrome, or Android — to exclude competitors for a minimum of 10 years.
  • Submit to two independent watchdog groups to ensure the sale is carried out properly and that all rules are met.

RELATED: How Google went from American innovation to tech stagnation

sesame/Getty Images

Fast-forward to September 2026, and now the final major repercussion is no longer in play. District Judge Brinkema ruled that Google will not have to sell its ad business after all, allowing the company to keep all of its main products and services intact.

That said, consequences still loom for the Big Tech giant. Like in the case before it, Google will have to make behavioral changes to its business model. The exact remedies are still sealed in District Judge Brinkema’s official opinion, which is expected to be released by the end of September.

Regardless of the information contained inside, one thing is clear: Google earned the ire of the courts, got itself slapped down with two back-to-back antitrust lawsuits, and even as it stumbled on the cusp of the biggest company breakup since AT&T, the tech giant still came out with all of its parts attached. Only time will tell if Google can keep its nose out of trouble.

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Free money wins elections — and that’s why America’s debt will keep growing



As Republicans head toward what looks like a perilous midterm election, affordability is on everyone’s lips. The Biden administration never convinced voters that it had brought food and housing costs under control. Some Republicans have tried to pretend the problem does not exist; others have acknowledged it without making meaningful progress.

Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump made choices that worsened the pressure, from expanding federal spending to deepening costly foreign commitments. Neither party has a durable solution. The Congressional Budget Office projects a $1.9 trillion deficit for fiscal year 2026, and debt held by the public now tops 101% of GDP. Spending and inflation are not accidents at the edge of mass democracy. They follow from its incentives, and nothing will change until the incentives do.

In a democracy, giving voters something is the winning strategy, and Trump likes winning.

The affordability crisis has several causes, but much of the immediate pain comes from the cumulative rise in prices. Wages may rise and bank balances may grow, yet each dollar buys less. Inflation is a pernicious tax precisely because it is hidden. Normal taxes must be enacted and collected openly. No one votes directly for inflation, which instead erodes the value of money people have already earned and saved. It punishes careful savers while rewarding borrowers and speculators.

Deficit spending can fuel inflation when government expands demand faster than the economy can supply goods and services. Creating money makes it easier to distribute benefits today, but it can reduce the currency’s purchasing power tomorrow. Inflation also lightens the real burden of government debt by reducing the value of what was borrowed. The average person, however, rarely has early access to new money or the sophisticated financial instruments wealthy investors use to hedge against rising prices. He feels the loss at the grocery store.

The oldest move in politics is to offer people a material reward for their support. Every system does it, but democracy makes the exchange especially powerful because elections confer legitimacy. A politician rarely calls the arrangement a “bribe.” He routes the benefit through a program aimed at groups likely to reward him at the polls. The legal form gives the transaction respectability, but voters still understand the bargain.

Donald Trump recently dispensed with even that pretense. At the Republican midterm convention last week, he promised $5,000 to every adult citizen if Republicans retain the House and Senate. An independent estimate put the cost at more than $1.2 trillion, and Congress would have to approve it. Whether the payments ever materialize is not the point. The offer mocks the fiscal restraint conservatives claim to espouse. Conservative commentators objected, but Trump brushed them aside. He understands the incentives. He promised not to cut Social Security and Medicare because benefits win votes. In a democracy, giving voters something is the winning strategy, and Trump likes winning.

RELATED:The GOP still has a loser mentality

Blaze Media Illustration

Warnings about democracy long predate modern America. Plato and Aristotle distrusted rule by the demos, and the American founders built a constitutional republic with layers of insulation against popular majorities. Their fear was simple: Once voters discover they can use the state to transfer other people’s money to themselves, restraint collapses. A republic may survive only if institutions impose limits that elections alone will not.

Is the $5,000 check good fiscal policy? Of course not. It’s a disaster. A transfer approaching $1.2 trillion would widen the deficit and almost certainly worsen inflation, especially in an economy already near capacity. Pandemic-era fiscal stimulus did not single-handedly cause the 2021-2022 inflation surge; supply shocks and monetary policy mattered too. But New York Federal Reserve research found that fiscal support contributed materially.

Is the check good politics? Yes. In a democracy, vote-buying is an optimal strategy, and anyone who refuses it risks losing to someone who will. Democrats have principles that let them hand out money and receive praise — and votes. Republicans profess principles that should forbid it. Sound economics grants no electoral advantage.

Reckless spending is terrible policy, but it can win elections. Conservatives may campaign on austerity, but austerity rarely inspires voters. If progressives alone use the winning strategy, conservative fiscal theory becomes irrelevant. Losers do not write budgets or exercise executive power. Both parties therefore spend when they hold office, though they direct the money toward different constituencies. The democratic incentive is to distribute everything you can while you can, because the other side may take power tomorrow and spend it instead.

RELATED: We need lawfare for white men

Blaze Media Illustration

The philosopher Nick Land captured the logic in “The Dark Enlightenment”:

As the democratic virus burns through society, painstakingly accumulated habits and attitudes of forward-thinking, prudential, human and industrial investment are replaced by a sterile, orgiastic consumerism, financial incontinence, and a “reality television” political circus. Tomorrow might belong to the other team, so it’s best to eat it all now.

None of this is hopeful. Conservatives have made preserving mass democracy a principle even as the system rewards policies they oppose. A constitutional republic needs constraints on majoritarian appetite, but there is little political will even for modest spending cuts, much less fundamental limits on the franchise. The brutal truth is that both parties will keep spending recklessly while blaming each other for rising debt and prices.

As long as mass democracy reigns, buying votes with public money will remain one of the surest ways to gain and hold power. Every politician wants power.

Despite welcome reform, the war on America's truckers rages on



It’s National Truck Driver Appreciation Week, when the American Trucking Associations holds its annual hot dog and hamburger lunches for the same drivers it spends the rest of the year screwing through its lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C.

This year, however, drivers might enjoy the free food, cheap swag, and various other perks — if they happen to be in the yard for them — with just a little less cynicism. That’s because the industry’s annual PR stunt happens to coincide with something considerably more valuable: the kind of tangible political "appreciation" that actually produces real change.

Most Americans would probably be astonished by how easy it has been to summon a trucking company into existence.

On Monday, August 31, Vice President JD Vance gave a speech in Sterling Heights, Michigan, in support of Republican congressional candidate Mike Rogers ahead of the midterm elections.

Though Vance started with praise for Rogers and other members of the party, he quickly pivoted to problems in the trucking industry and the administration's efforts to address them, while also highlighting the hard work and sacrifice of American truckers and the displacement they have faced in recent years.

“For too long ... the Biden administration allowed American workers and American drivers to be endangered and have their jobs stolen by foreign fraudsters,” Vance said.

“Today is about restoring the basic principle that if you want to drive a big truck on America's roads, you ought to be able to speak English, you ought to be a legal resident of the United States of America, and you ought to have basic qualifications because trucking is too important to let it go to foreign fraudsters.”

Flooded with foreign labor

Vance, like anyone else paying attention, can see that the trucking industry has been flooded with foreign labor, helping keep the freight costs of Fortune 500 America low while externalizing the real costs onto everyone else.

The Trump administration's crackdown has illuminated the scope of the problem. A 2025 analysis prepared for J.B. Hunt by transportation economist Noël Perry estimated that the administration's English-language requirements, immigration enforcement, and restrictions on non-domiciled commercial driver's licenses could ultimately remove as many as 614,000 drivers from the industry — nearly 16% of the nation's heavy-truck driver population.

Speaking more freely to Overdrive, Perry said the number could go as high as 800,000 — a figure more in line with estimates I've heard coming from administration insiders.

The obvious losers in all of this have been legitimate American trucking companies. An already brutal freight market has been made even harder by competition from unscrupulous operators willing to cut corners by skirting the licensing, training, labor, and safety standards responsible carriers have to meet.

And the problem is compounded by Mexican trucking companies engaging in illegal cabotage — hauling domestic loads between American destinations using Mexican trucks and drivers.

More than 20 trucking-related companies sought bankruptcy protection during one 30-day period this spring alone, and another 21 transportation and supply-chain businesses filed for Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 between late July and August 25.

The administration's crackdown is finally beginning to tighten the freight market and push rates back up. But in a classic case of you win some, you lose some, diesel prices have now hit record highs.

License to kill?

Vance's speech also coincided with an announcement from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy of a “whole-of-government” attack on another part of the problem: deficient CDL schools churning out poorly trained and sometimes completely unqualified drivers onto American highways.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, a division of DOT, issued immediate shutdown notices to 110 truck-driving schools and put another 160 on notice that they could be removed from operation.

The stakes are much higher than faulty paperwork. According to DOT, non-domiciled drivers who would no longer qualify for licenses under the administration's new rules were involved in at least 17 fatal crashes that killed 30 people in 2025 alone. Yes, 30 innocent Americans died thanks to drivers who can't read road signs, don't know the rules of the road, and have no business getting behind the wheel of what is essentially an 80,000-pound missile. On the other hand, somebody saved a bundle on labor costs.

Say their names

This summer has been just as deadly. In July, 21-year-old University of Massachusetts Lowell soccer player Tobias “Toby” Forsythe was killed on Interstate 71 in Ohio when a tractor-trailer driven by 42-year-old Bekhzod Asrarov slammed into the back of his car.

Asrarov, an Uzbek national who entered the United States through the diversity visa lottery in 2024, held an Ohio CDL but needed Google Translate to communicate with first responders at the scene. According to court records and law-enforcement sources, he also tried to destroy or conceal his dashcam and other electronic devices after the crash.

Ah yes, another highly skilled, conscientious immigrant doing his part to help alleviate America's fake trucker "shortage."

And the deaths continued during the very week of Duffy's announcement.

In the early hours of September 4, in Mesquite, Texas, 33-year-old Lisa Maldonado was killed in a crash involving a truck driven by Khasan Begbaev, who was working for a subcontractor hauling for Knight-Swift, one of America's largest trucking companies. Begbaev has been charged with manslaughter. Police say he was reversing down a freeway entrance ramp before the crash.

On September 3, 50-year-old Brenda Watson was killed in a head-on collision in Ohio after a semi driven by Manjit Singh pulled out to pass another vehicle and struck Watson's car. Transportation Secretary Duffy subsequently said Singh was being held on an active Homeland Security detainer and that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration was investigating both his carrier and the training school where he received his CDL.

Two days earlier, police in Moab, Utah, stopped 30-year-old Chamkaur Singh (no relation) after clocking him driving a semi-truck 20 miles per hour over the speed limit. When officers ran his name, they discovered a nationwide warrant for vehicular manslaughter stemming from a California semi crash that killed four people. California authorities had reportedly been searching for him for two months.

Amazon's shame

Also on September 1, a horrific crash took place in Tennessee involving a tractor-trailer pulling an Amazon trailer. The truck crossed the median on Interstate 40, crashed into several vehicles, and burst into flames. Its driver, 35-year-old Farahov Fhsvaisov, was killed and three other people were hospitalized.

The cause remains under investigation, and little has been publicly reported about Fhsvaisov beyond his registered Brooklyn address — an essentially meaningless bureaucratic detail. As for Fhsvaisov's actual citizenship and licensing status, that is precisely the kind of information Kathy Hochul's New York is now suing to keep out of the Trump administration's hands.

And it's not just New York. More than 20 states and the District of Columbia have joined the challenge to federal demands for access to commercial-driver information held in state databases. The states cite privacy concerns and argue that the federal government lacks the authority to obtain the information; the administration says access is necessary to uncover fraud and illegally obtained commercial licenses.

Amazon's apparent involvement in the Fhsvaisov crash can't help but recall long-standing questions about the company's enormous network of outside trucking contractors. A 2022 Wall Street Journal investigation found that frequent Amazon contractors were more than twice as likely as comparable carriers to receive poor unsafe-driving scores; a later CBS News analysis found Amazon contractors had unsafe-driving violation rates at least 89% higher than other carriers in every month of the six-year period it examined.

Highway to hell

Yet while Secretary Duffy and other elements of the Trump administration are trying to restore sanity to the trucking industry, truckers are being attacked not only by the forces bringing insourced labor to compete with them, but by many on the left who want to preserve that system.

Truckers are also being threatened by the clumsiness of some of Duffy's reforms as well as elements in the Republican Party that want to replace truckers not only with insourced labor but eventually with robots.

Let's start with licensing.

In March, the FMCSA issued a new rule limiting who can be issued what is called a “non-domiciled” CDL.

Non-domiciled CDLs began as a narrow exception for drivers who could not obtain a recognized commercial license where they lived, including certain foreign drivers. Under the Obama administration, the old “nonresident CDL” was renamed the “non-domiciled CDL.”

The category became far more consequential over time. In 2019, during Trump’s first term, the FMCSA issued guidance — later endorsed by the American Trucking Associations — allowing foreign nationals with federal work permits to obtain non-domiciled CDLs.

Then came the Biden immigration surge. As the administration extended work authorization to huge numbers of migrants, it also vastly expanded the pool of foreign workers who could take advantage of the non-domiciled CDL system. Investigations into the system through 2025 found that roughly 200,000 drivers had been issued these licenses illegally and would see them revoked, or at least would not be renewed on expiry.

The Trump administration has now effectively closed the broader EAD pathway, limiting non-domiciled CDLs to a much narrower group of foreign workers with specific employment-based visas.

'Public' menace

The new rule is now being challenged in federal court. The lawsuit was filed by Public Citizen, the progressive advocacy group founded by Ralph Nader, on behalf of two immigrant truck drivers, AFSCME, and the American Federation of Teachers. It argues that the FMCSA does not have the legal authority to remove such a large class of legally authorized immigrants from CDL eligibility.

For their part, the unions claim to be advocating on behalf of immigrant members who could lose their jobs under the rule. That puts two major American labor unions in the strange position of fighting a reform that could remove a huge pool of foreign labor from competition with American drivers.

How organized labor wound up fighting to preserve cheap foreign competition is a question for another piece. Curious readers might begin by looking into the sprawling network of nonprofits and foundations funding Public Citizen; several of them are also major backers of more permissive immigration policies.

RELATED: The deadly trucker crisis — and why mass migration is to blame

Justin Hamel/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Dalilah's Law

There is, however, a straightforward way for supporters of the crackdown to fight back: Put the reforms into federal law.

Dalilah's Law is named after a California girl who suffered catastrophic injuries after the car her mother was driving was rear-ended by a commercial truck. If passed, the law would tighten CDL standards, reinforce English-proficiency requirements, restrict eligibility for non-domiciled licenses, and crack down on deficient driver-training schools.

It would also address the outsourcing of freight brokerages and dispatch services overseas, a little-discussed but important part of the problem. If a load broker in Serbia or Pakistan fails to perform necessary due diligence in vetting a carrier, holding that broker accountable from the United States can be extraordinarily difficult. Dalilah's Law would bring more of this activity within reach of American regulators.

No good deed

While all this is going on, the FMCSA has undertaken a revamp of the federal system through which trucking companies register. In an interview with “60 Minutes” earlier this year, FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs described the industry as having a “front door” problem: It has been too easy for bad actors — including so-called chameleon carriers, unsafe trucking companies that shut down and simply reappear under new names — to enter or re-enter the market.

Most Americans would probably be astonished by how easy it has been to summon a trucking company into existence. Just pay the $300 federal operating-authority fee, provide insurance and paperwork, and list a U.S. business address.

On paper, that address has to check out, and within 12 months you're supposed to undergo a safety audit, followed by monitoring for the rest of an 18-month probationary period. But that assumes an overwhelmed system actually gets to you.

To address this, our bureaucrats have decided to bureaucrat some more with a new system called Motus, which has produced the results typical of government: penalizing operators who attempt to obey the rules, while essentially giving a free pass to anyone determined to break the law.

In a detailed examination of the rollout, trucking-industry writer Danielle Chaffin documented legitimate carriers unable to operate because Motus incorrectly showed them as inactive or saddled them with erroneous insurance requirements. At the same time, she found carriers with out-of-service orders — including some with no insurance on file — still showing as active in the new system. As one carrier put it, Motus was “waving the bad actors through the gate and choking the honest ones out.”

It seems like decent American companies continue to get stuck in the pincer between the open border policies of the previous administration, and the seeming unwillingness of government agencies to go full Genghis Khan against the bad actors allowed into the industry.

Backing the bots

As if displacement and replacement by foreign labor weren't bad enough, we are also looking down the barrel of driver replacement by automation — something the Trump administration is actively encouraging even while it takes steps to protect truckers from foreign labor.

On September 3, DOT released its “National Strategy for Automated Vehicles,” laying out the administration's priorities for automated-vehicle technology through 2030. The document largely concerns the bureaucratic minutiae of regulating vehicles that may or may not accommodate a human driver at all. But it will also help guide how the government deals with autonomous trucks.

Congress is considering the BUILD America 250 Act, a major surface-transportation bill that includes a federal framework for autonomous commercial vehicles. Republicans are also behind legislation such as the AMERICA DRIVES Act, introduced by California Republican Rep. Vince Fong, provisions of which have been incorporated into the larger bill.

The legislation seeks to limit state-level regulatory authority over autonomous commercial vehicles, including state requirements that certain highly automated trucks have a human being aboard.

Supporters argue that a national framework is necessary to prevent a patchwork of state regulations from strangling an emerging American technology. But Republicans should understand why their messaging looks confused to America's truckers and why Fong's bill seems at odds with their usual commitment to federalism.

On one hand, the administration is finally addressing their replacement by foreign labor. On the other, Republicans are working to remove regulatory barriers for technology whose ultimate promise is to move freight without anyone sitting behind the wheel.

Stuck in the middle

Do we have any friends in government at all?

The left appears happy to defend policies that allow American trucking companies to replace domestic labor with cheaper foreign drivers. Republicans are finally addressing that problem, but they also appear remarkably credulous when dealing with autonomous-vehicle developers whose technology could eventually supplant truckers' jobs altogether.

Vice President Vance said in his speech that “we care about America's truckers because for generations they have represented something much greater ... the very best of this country's character, people who spend long hours away from their families.”

“In some ways, truckers are the modern cowboys.”

I would submit to Vice President Vance that the administration's actions thus far have been welcome and helpful for America's truckers, and they deserve to be commended. But the administration needs to do more. It should continue removing bad actors from the trucking industry, pass Dalilah's Law, make sure its own bureaucracy doesn't punish legitimate operators, and be more realistic about what emerging technologies mean for us and for our economy.

The modern cowboys would like to keep on trucking for as long as we can.

Democrats Spin Their Medicare Spending Explosion Into A Narrative About GOP ‘Cuts’

Democrats inflate spending on government programs without anyone noticing and then attack Republicans for 'cuts' when they attempt to scale back these stealth spending increases.