Exclusive: Why Border Patrol is detaining immigrant truckers on Arizona highways
Navjot Singh was hauling frozen chicken along Interstate 40 near Kingman, Ariz., on the morning of May 15 when he said an unmarked SUV began tailgating him. The vehicle followed him for roughly five miles, and when it finally switched on police lights near Exit 44, two men in jeans, T-shirts and green vests walked up to his cab and asked if he was a U.S. citizen.
Singh, a 26-year-old commercial truck driver from India, said he handed over his California-issued commercial driver's license and told the agents he had a work permit tied to a pending asylum case. It didn't matter. He was taken into custody, and his 70-foot refrigerated semitruck was left on the shoulder of a downhill stretch of highway. Singh said he spent 34 days in Eloy Detention Center south of Phoenix before an immigration judge ordered his release.
“They just want to show to the American people that voted for (President Donald) Trump that they're doing something. They just want the numbers. And I was just a number. They arrested me,” Singh said.
His case sits at the center of a heated fight over the Trump administration's crackdown on immigrant truck drivers moving freight through Arizona. For months, Border Patrol agents have been stopping truckers on Interstate 40 near Kingman and Interstate 10 near Yuma, pulling in drivers who hold non-domiciled commercial driver's licenses — the licenses states issue to people who are legally present and authorized to work but do not have a permanent domicile in that state.
Administration officials say the enforcement effort is about highway safety. They argue that some immigrant truck drivers don't have enough English proficiency to read road signs or communicate during safety inspections, and that others are driving with work permits that have lapsed or were improperly issued. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration started strictly enforcing English standards in May 2025, requiring drivers who fail testing during inspections to be removed from the road immediately. In September, it announced a rule that took effect in March limiting new non-domiciled commercial driver's licenses to noncitizens with H-2A, H-2B or E-2 visas. That blocks asylum-seekers, Temporary Protected Status holders and DACA recipients from using work permits to qualify for those licenses.
Federal officials also point to fatal crashes. In August 2025, three people were killed on Florida's Turnpike near Fort Pierce after a truck driver from India made an illegal U-turn that blocked all lanes, according to the Department of Homeland Security. “When illegal aliens are behind the wheels of semi-trucks, they are putting American lives in danger,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said Aug. 4, announcing a separate enforcement operation in the Midwest.
In Arizona, Border Patrol's Yuma Sector ran a five-day operation in May called Operation Checkmate. Officials said agents arrested 52 people, including 36 immigrant truck drivers with commercial driver's licenses, most of whom had work permits issued during the Biden administration that were no longer valid. Dustin Caudle, the sector's acting chief patrol agent, said in a statement that the operation reflected “our commitment to safeguarding communities and roads from unlawfully present drivers who pose significant risks to public safety.”
In August, DHS announced results of a separate Midwest operation that detained 51 undocumented immigrants, including 21 truck drivers with non-domiciled commercial driver's licenses from California and New York. Officials said they also took 766 unsafe drivers and vehicles out of service, arrested 86 drivers for dangerous behavior and removed 36 drivers who failed English proficiency tests.
The push has drawn support from parts of the trucking industry. Tony Bradley, president and CEO of the Arizona Trucking Association, said foreign-born truckers have been part of the business for decades, but the post-pandemic freight boom pulled in new operators and drivers, along with “bad actors” who took advantage of weak oversight.
“If you can't understand when an electronic road sign says to slow down, that becomes a real safety issue,” Bradley said. “We've had foreign drivers be part of the trucking industry for a very long time, but it's the safety aspect that we're concerned about.”
Bradley also tied the influx to a post-pandemic “freight recession,” when an oversupply of carriers and drivers pushed prices down. Some operators went out of business; others, he said, cut corners by hiring immigrant truckers willing to work for less. Some of those drivers, he added, were probably “exploited by these bad actors.”
Immigrant truck drivers caught up in the sweeps dispute the safety rationale. Many say they are operating legally, and their advocates say the enforcement can be applied too easily against drivers who fit a profile.
Josh Rosenthal, a workers' rights attorney with the Asian Law Caucus, said abandoned loads have become a recurring problem on highways in Arizona and other states. Drivers and employers have told him that owners often have to fly replacement drivers to retrieve the loads. He said some of the abandoned loads were perishable produce from California's Central Valley.
He also said a large number of Punjabi Sikh drivers in the industry fear they are being targeted because their religious practices include wearing turbans and not cutting their hair. In a legal brief filed in federal court, the Asian Law Caucus and a coalition of Sikh advocacy groups said Sikh truck drivers have faced harassment since the crackdown began, including people throwing water bottles at trucks and shouting slurs.
Critics say the crackdown is less about safety than about the administration's broader immigration agenda. Cassandra Zimmer-Wong, an immigration policy analyst at More in Common who previously wrote about the crackdown while at the Niskanen Center, called it “just an immigration raid by any other name.”
Zimmer-Wong said the administration is “manipulating a bureaucratic issue” to make immigrants look like rule-breakers. She pointed to a mismatch: commercial driver's licenses can be valid for years, while work permits often expire after one or two years, with renewals delayed by backlogs, stricter vetting and the termination of automatic extensions under the Trump administration, according to the American Immigration Council. A lapsed work permit, she said, is not necessarily proof that someone is in the country illegally.
Zimmer-Wong also said the administration's public-safety argument relies on high-profile anecdotes, not data. The FMCSA itself, she said, acknowledged when it announced the new restrictions that there is no hard evidence showing immigrant truck drivers are less safe than American truck drivers.
“Do I think that these expiration dates should be standardized? One hundred percent. That feels like a clear fix to me. But I don't think the answer is taking 200,000 people off of the road when likely the vast majority of them are legally here,” Zimmer-Wong said.
Dale Rogers, an Arizona State University professor of logistics and supply chain management, said he believes the crackdown is part of a broader pattern. “It's part of the overall Trump administration being cruel about immigration,” Rogers said.
He also said the trucking industry has economic reasons to support tighter enforcement: fewer drivers on the road can push freight rates up, helping carriers but eventually raising costs for consumers. Immigrant drivers, he said, have long filled labor gaps in a sector that many Americans no longer want to work in, especially on long-haul routes.
“It's not different than harvesting in the fields or working in landscaping or the other jobs that mostly Americans don't want to do,” Rogers said. “We let our immigrants ... fill in the necessary holes.”
Singh's case illustrates how quickly a routine haul can turn into a detention. He said his family left India in 2016, when he was 16, after death threats tied to his father's political affiliation. After living in several European countries, he came to the United States in 2023 and crossed the border near Yuma without authorization. He applied for asylum, received a work permit, completed truck-driving school and got his California CDL in December 2024.
On May 15, Singh was taking a load of frozen chicken from a processing plant in Lebanon, Indiana, to a warehouse in Victorville, California. He said the Border Patrol agents who stopped him near Kingman would not let him move the truck to a safer position. “That was a dangerous spot. It was on a downhill,” he said.
The truck, loaded with 40,000 pounds of chicken on 28 pallets, was worth between $100,000 and $150,000, Singh said. He said the only thing that saved the load from spoiling was that the refrigeration unit had just been refueled. The owner could not reach Arizona for several days.
Singh said he spent five days in a Border Patrol processing center in Yuma, where he was held in a cold cell without blankets, then was transferred to Eloy Detention Center. There, he said, he met between 50 and 60 other immigrant truck drivers from India, Turkey, Russia and Mexico. He was released after an immigration judge ordered it following a habeas petition filed on his behalf.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson disputed parts of Singh's account, describing him in a written statement as an “illegal alien” from India who is in immigration proceedings and was apprehended after a failed smuggling attempt. The spokesperson said Singh has “never” been at Eloy Detention Center and that a work permit or pending asylum case does not confer legal status. A habeas petition filed in U.S. District Court of Arizona, however, verifies Singh was held there.
Singh said he asked one of the agents whether he had been pulled over “because I'm brown.” The agent said no, “but I know that was the only reason,” Singh said. He also said the Border Patrol's Yuma Sector used a photo of his commercial driver's license in an Instagram post after the May operation, set to a clip of Johnny Cash's “I've Been Everywhere,” which he took as mockery.
After his release, Singh returned to Fresno. He said his commercial driver's license is still valid, but he can no longer drive because he is required to wear a GPS monitoring ankle bracelet and cannot travel more than 75 miles from home.
Foreign-born truck drivers are a significant part of the industry. Their numbers more than doubled from 316,000 in 2000 to 720,000 by 2021, according to the National Immigration Forum. Roughly 18% of all truckers are foreign born.
Raman Dhillon, CEO of the North American Punjabi Trucking Association, said he has no problem removing unsafe drivers from the road. “I don't want somebody traveling right next to my family with no knowledge of what a warning sign says and doesn't know to push the brakes while my family is stopped on the freeway. I don't want them on the road. Doesn't matter it's an Indian or whoever it is,” Dhillon said.
But he said detaining drivers with valid licenses and work permits suggests the operation is not just about safety. “The person is driving on a road with a valid driver license and valid work permit and is being picked up saying that you're illegal and you're unlicensed. That is wrong,” Dhillon said.
Dhillon noted that federal immigration agents are sometimes positioned at commercial truck weigh stations alongside state troopers. “I think this is easier to catch people when they're in the truck, they're by themselves, they're driving, they are on the scales, they're scared,” he said.
The policy is already being tested in court, where civil-rights groups have challenged the FMCSA's restrictions. For drivers like Singh, the fight is not abstract. A valid CDL now sits unused while he wears an ankle monitor and waits to see what happens next.