Justice is coming for victims of dangerous illegal-migrant truckers

A facet of the trucking industry little known to the general public has had a big impact on highway safety — and last week a US Supreme Court ruling ensured that it will have to take responsibility for the rigs it helps send out on the road.

That means innocent Americans who have been maimed or killed in big-rig crashes caused by negligent truck drivers may finally pursue justice.

And freight brokers that chase profits by contracting with unsafe trucking carriers — particularly those that hire unvetted illegal-immigrant drivers — will have to rethink their business practices.

The court’s unanimous 9-0 decision in Montgomery vs. Caribe Transport II, issued Thursday, cleared the way for victims to sue freight brokers for alleged “negligent hiring.”

Trucking industry veterans and victim advocates who have been ringing the alarm on Wall Street brokers’ shady practices are rejoicing in response.

“We are profoundly grateful to God for this miracle,” Shannon Everett of American Truckers United told me.

“This ruling clearly recognizes that highway safety demands full accountability from every participant on our nation’s roadways.”

Freight brokers are the industry’s middlemen.

They handle the logistics of connecting producers that have goods to be moved to carriers whose trucks and drivers can get those goods to buyers.  

But for years, Everett said, brokers have “operated behind a shield of presumed immunity.”

They chose carriers to move the goods, but legally bore no responsibility when the carriers they hired operated negligently.

And when brokers chased profits over safety by hiring cut-rate carriers, Everett said, it “pitted Main Street trucking companies against Wall Street freight brokers . . . and contributed to an untold number of preventable deaths on our highways.”

According to Everett, the American trucking industry has been infiltrated by foreign “chameleon carriers” that took advantage of a formerly high-trust industry and bastardized it for profit.

The illegal-immigrant driver who speaks no English doesn’t magically end up behind the wheel of a big rig by himself: An entire ecosystem of greedy foreign and domestic elements put him in the driver’s seat, abetted by failed policy decisions that left American drivers as collateral damage.

The Biden administration not only failed to maintain the southern border and admitted millions making suspect claims of asylum, it gave many of those people work authorizations to boot.

States like New York and California easily awarded commercial driver’s licenses to those migrants.

That created an opportunity for foreign entities to set up shop within our borders, bringing in thousands of minimally trained, non-English-speaking truck drivers willing to work for long hours and low pay.

But these operations couldn’t prosper without a middleman who asked no questions in exchange for profit.

Too many freight brokers stepped in to be the bridge connecting shady carriers and their unvetted drivers with shippers large and small.

They’ve been allowed to operate as mere matchmakers who aren’t responsible for what happens on the road.

But the ramifications of the brokers’ decisions have been enormous.

Deeply undercut by this cheap foreign labor force, long-standing American trucking companies have shut down, and American drivers have been forced out of the business.

The illegal-immigrant drivers are all but indentured servants, literally living behind the wheels of trucks and driving twice as long as an American trucker is permitted to.

And innocent American motorists have spilled their blood as a result.

For my upcoming documentary, “The Illegal Highways,” I’ve sat down with Deann Miller, a devastated widow who lost her husband Scott, the love of her life, to an accident caused by a Mexican illegal-immigrant truck driver who had been deported 16 times.

I’ve interviewed the Pearson family, whose husband and father Robert “Blake” Pearson was killed when an illegal immigrant trucker from India crashed into his car.

Both families believe they’ve never received adequate justice for their shattering losses — because the prosecutors have seen the drivers’ immigration status as political, the carriers are fly-by-night entities able to disappear without a trace, and the brokers contracting with those carriers were seemingly untouchable.

Until now.

The high court’s decision has opened a true avenue of justice for these families — and will bring necessary change to the industry.

No longer can brokers close their eyes to carriers’ poor safety records and dubious hiring practices.

Irresponsible brokers have blood on their hands, and now it’s time for them to pay the price.

Adam B. Coleman is the author of “The Children We Left Behind” and founder of Wrong Speak Publishing.