Supreme Court Solves Alien Truck Driver Problem By Making Use Of Them Nearly Uninsurable.

Freight brokers connecting trucking companies to businesses needing freight moved are now potentially liable for the death and destruction that results from truck driver negligence.

Illegal U-turn in the middle of a Florida Highway kills three.

* After I started writing this article there was another accident in California that claimed two lives. The truck driver was an illegal alien from India.

The driver, Manvir Singh, entered the United States illegally by crossing the southern border into Arizona in July 2023 and was released into the country by the Biden Administration. California issued a Commercial Driver’s License to him in March 2025.

Around 12:20 p.m, a Toyota Camry, a Nissan Frontier, and a Kia Forte were slowing to a complete stop in the far right lane of the highway. A Freightliner Cascadia driven by Manvir Singh, 24, reportedly failed to stop for the slowed traffic, striking a guardrail and the Kia Forte, causing a chain-reaction crash involving the Toyota Camry and the Nissan Frontier.

ICE said that Singh fled on foot after the crash and was later apprehended by police.

The two people in the Kia Forte, a 16-year old male and a 20-year old male, died at the scene.

Five others were hospitalized, including two people who suffered major injuries.

---

Believe it or not, “back in the day” as a second year law student I was a legal intern for the American Trucking Association in Northern Virginia. My six months working there didn’t make me an expert on the trucking business — I spent most of my time doing research on various diesel tax issues in various states — but it has always stuck with me as a subject of interest.

In addition, my uncle shuttered a family business he operated for about 25 years, took the money he received from liquidation of his inventory and bought a Peterbilt tractor-trailer with about all the best features you could order at the time. Then he and my aunt became an independent owner-operator and traveled the country for 15 years until he retired. I learned some about his side of the industry from his experiences.

From the perspective of an “outsider looking in” it seems that over the past 25 years or so, the American trucking industry has fallen victim to the same issues with cheap foreign labor as has been true in so many other domestic business sectors. With relaxed immigration enforcement and foreign nationals who have come to understand not only how easily they could get into the country but also how easily they could find work with and without legal authorization, the supply of cheap labor seemed inexhaustible.

Enter the foreign national — maybe illegal alien — commercial truck driver who is willing to work long hours for a significant discount compared to the U.S. citizen commercial truck driver, whether employed by small trucking companies or as an owner-operator like my uncle.

Several months ago I wrote this article on how easy it was for an illegal alien to obtain a commercial driver’s license — CDL. My article focused on California’s DMV, where proof of identity or lawful status in the country is not necessary to get through the process of getting a driver’s license, and then obtaining a CDL.

Commercial freight prices generally are pegged to a baseline “per mile” rate. There are factors that can increase or decrease that rate, but the competition in the industry is mostly tied to who can ship freight from Point A to Point B at the lowest cost. The cost of the driver is one component of the “fixed costs” that are subsumed into the “per mile” rate. Cheaper drivers equal lower per mile rates. Driver compensation, including payroll taxes, benefits, insurance, and all other driver-specific costs, make up nearly 40% of the per mile operating expense of running a commercial truck.

Enter the “Freight Broker.”

Freight brokers act as middlemen connecting companies or individuals who need goods moved with trucking companies or owner-operators who will haul that freight. The broker does not normally own trucks or handle the cargo themselves. They facilitate the movement of freight efficiently by handling the logistics that shippers and carriers often prefer not to manage themselves due to a lack of expertise. They find available carriers for specific shipments. Brokers are paid by commission — the spread between what the shipper pays the broker and what the broker pays the trucker.

As noted by the Supreme Court’s opinion I explain further below, 28,000 freight brokers provide this “middleman” service to businesses needing to ship goods via 780,000 freight carriers in the United States daily.

While reputable freight brokers have GENERALLY engaged in checking carriers they contract with for insurance, safety ratings, reliability, etc., that has been one area of the industry where failures to do so by the brokers might impact the brokers’ reputation, but didn’t generally result in other consequences to them. Some brokers rely on the very cheapest option in the trucking company marketplace — warts and all — and for many years that end of the spectrum offering the lowest per mile price has come to be dominated by immigrant-owned trucking businesses that employ almost entirely immigrant drivers — some in the U.S. legally and some illegally — who come at a much lower cost.

Until now.

There have been many highly publicized incidents recently of incredibly tragic fatal accidents involving immigrant truck drivers, and much reporting on the fact that a large number of such drivers clearly don’t meet the standards of the U.S. Department of Transportation to operate commercial trucks on U.S. highways.

On May 14, 2026, the Supreme Court decided Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II. The issue in the case was whether freight brokers are immune from civil liability for state law “negligent hiring” claims under a provision of the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act (FAAAA), which preempts some state laws regarding “services” in the trucking industry.

C.H. Robinson Worldwide, a freight broker, hired Caribe Transport II to transport a freight load through Illinois. The Caribe driver caused an accident in which the plaintiff Montgomery suffered severe and permanent injuries. Montgomery included CH Robinson as a defendant in his lawsuit under Illinois state law on a claim of “negligent hiring” — that CH Robinson knew of Caribe Transport’s poor safety record, and the injuries to Montgomery were reasonably foreseeable when it brokered the freight load to Caribe.

The FAAAA expressly preempts certain state regulations involving motor carriers, and one year after it was first passed Congress amended it so that it preempted state regulations of brokers. The preemption prohibits States from “enact[ing] or enforc[ing] a law, regulation, or other provision having the force and effect of law related to a price, route, or service with respect to the transportation of property.”

Freight brokers don’t handle freight loads and they don’t own trucks or employ drivers. They provide a “service with respect to the transportation of property.” So CH Robinson claimed in response the lawsuit brought by Montgomery that it was entitled to the benefit of the FAAAA’s preemption of state negligence laws in the form of a “negligent hiring” claim because it provided a “service with respect to transportation.…”

The Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, disagreed:

While the FAAAA’s preemption provision is broad, it contains exceptions. One— which we will call the safety exception — provides that the preemption provision “shall not restrict the safety regulatory authority of a State with respect to motor vehicles….” Congress designed the safety exception “to ensure that its preemption of States’ economic authority over motor carriers of property [did] ‘not restrict’ the preexisting and traditional state police power over safety.”

From a legal perspective — i.e., the “nerds” — the interesting part of Justice Barrett’s rather common sense observation is that while it might not seem obvious that the “safety regulatory authority” of a state would include the ability of a private litigant to bring suit against another private litigant in connection to a car accident, that state law allows the aggrieved party to do so is part of the manner in which “safety” on the roads and highways in the state is regulated. The Court cites several cases that stand for the proposition that common law duties and standards of care to avoid negligent conduct that injures others are an effective methods of “governing conduct” and “controlling policy.”

The only question remaining was whether “negligent hiring” claims with regard to trucking companies and their drivers are “claims relating to motor vehicles.” The Court concluded that giving the words their ordinary meaning, claims to establish liability based on negligent driving — even if they involve only hiring the negligent drivers — are “claims relating to motor vehicles.”

Because Montgomery, the Plaintiff, alleged claims of negligence — “lack of due care” — by Robinson when it hired Caribe, where Caribe had a subpar safety rating from the Dept. of Transportation that was a matter of public record, Robinson knew or should have known that Caribe was reasonably likely to cause an accident. On that basis, Montgomery could sue Robinson, the broker, for Robinson’s “negligent hiring” of Caribe, the trucking company with a subpart safety record.

The legal analysis here is not too remarkable. But the outcome is likely to remake the trucking industry in substantial ways — immediately. Freight brokers carry liability insurance for a variety of possible claims that might arise with regard to the transportation of freight. The risk of loss on any particular load was, as a general proposition, limited by the value of the freight. That made the determination of insurance rates relatively easy. No more.

Now the risk that insurance company will be asked to cover is the substantially higher potential damages that can arise from serious automobile accidents that leave the victim with permanent injuries that require a lifetime of care as well as lifetime economic losses due to an inability to earn a living. Emotional distress damages suffered by family members are now in place for freight brokers as well.

The dollar value risk of employing a fly-by-night shipping company employing unqualified — even if licensed — holders of CDLs have increased by orders of magnitude compared to the risk that existed prior to the Supreme Court’s decision.

I expect there to now develop an entire sub-industry in the freight brokerage business that does nothing but provide a quantitative “safety ratings” for trucking companies — particularly ones that are known to hire illegal immigrant drivers with dubious qualifications in order to offer rock-bottom per mile rates. The very fact that a trucking company operates in the bottom tier of per mile rates is going to be a red flag with regard to safety due to the fact that driver costs constitute 40% of the per mile rate. The easiest way to hold that per mile rate down is to hold driver wages down.

Freight brokers who ignore red flags relating to safety issues with the trucking companies they hire with will rapidly find themselves unable to obtain insurance. The lack of insurance will vastly narrow the market of shippers willing to engage them in their brokerage services.

You might be able to find it on X with a bit of searching, but within days after the Supreme Court decision there was a video circulating that was supposedly taken in the parking lot of a truck stop. The narrator of the video was capturing certain trucks that were parked without cargo in the lot, and commenting on the fact that many of the trucks had immigrant drivers who were not able to get loads in the location where they were parked. Unable to travel at their own expense without the expectation of receiving a payday at the other end, the drivers were simply stranded — sitting and waiting for some broker to hire them.

But those brokers now faced potential financial liability for not exercising due care that they had not faced a week earlier.

The cheapest available rate per mile was no longer the brokers’ best option.