Thirty people died in 17 semi-truck crashes caused by noncitizen commercial truck drivers in 2025, according to the Department of Transportation. That number is almost certainly an undercount. Prior to 2025, the immigration status of a commercial truck driver was mostly not recorded in crash reports, court filings, or news coverage. The national conversation focuses on the truck driver at fault for the latest accident, but rarely goes deeper. Why was this truck driver on the highways? What trucking company hired him? How are operations like this still in business?
Somewhere between receiving a package from the distribution center to your doorstep, there is a strong possibility that a freight broker was involved. Freight brokers exist to manage freight and risk for shippers, and to hire motor carriers (trucking companies) to haul that freight. They collect the margin between what the shipper pays them and what they pay the trucking company.
Until a Supreme Court ruling earlier this month, it was not considered the freight broker’s problem whether the trucking company it hired had a history of terrible safety violations, employed properly trained drivers, or safely maintained its trucks. Brokers had little reason not to hire cheaper, non-compliant trucking companies over compliant ones.
On May 14, the Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, and found that freight brokers can be held legally responsible for negligently hiring unsafe trucking companies.
Before the ruling, a freight broker’s liability depended on which state the crash occurred in. Negligent hiring claims against freight brokers have proceeded for years in the Sixth and Ninth Circuits, but not in the Seventh (Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin) and Eleventh (Alabama, Florida, and Georgia) Circuits, as freight brokers claimed preemption by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act of 1994. This left semi-truck crash victims in different parts of the country with fundamentally different legal options against the same class of defendant.
When a freight broker hired a trucking company, and that company’s truck driver caused a wreck that killed someone, the broker often walked away. The trucking company absorbed the liability, the family absorbed the loss, and when the verdict exceeded the carrier’s $750,000 minimum insurance coverage (a federal floor set in 1980 and never adjusted for inflation), the family absorbed that too. The middleman who chose the trucking company and profited from the load often faced no legal consequence.
Lack of Oversight
In concurring with the ruling, Justice Brett Kavanaugh described the pre-ruling landscape with unusual candor for a Supreme Court opinion. Federal law simultaneously blocked crash victims from suing brokers in state court and imposed no federal requirements on how brokers chose their carriers. Kavanaugh referred to this as a “black hole with no meaningful safety-related regulation.” The black hole reference is accurate. The freight industry has built a very profitable business inside that black hole.
The freight brokerage’s defense was always that federal safety oversight belonged with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), not the brokers. That argument might carry weight if the FMCSA actually regulated broker-carrier selection. However, it does not. The FMCSA mandates that brokers use federally registered carriers; that’s it. A motor carrier could be federally registered with a failing safety score, a pattern of out-of-service violations, and a history of crashes, and a broker that selected it satisfied every legal requirement.
The cheapest carriers, the ones cutting corners on safety, maintenance, driver qualifications, and insurance, kept winning freight because brokers had no legal incentive to screen them out and every financial incentive to use them. As truck driver Gord Magill stated, “There is a symbiotic problem right now between the increase in brokers and the increase in chameleon carriers.” For years, willful ignorance was the most profitable strategy in the freight industry.
Foreign Drivers
A major contributor to dangerous truck drivers was foreign truck drivers. Foreign-owned trucking companies staffed with non-domiciled drivers, operating with U.S. Commercial Driver Licenses issued through employment authorization documents that state agencies could not verify against any foreign driving record, were flooding the market and winning freight. They won it because they were cheap. They were cheap because they were cutting corners that legitimate carriers could not afford to cut. Brokers tendered to them because the FMCSA said they were registered, and registration was the only box to check.
However, the industry is not ignorant of industry and motor carrier data. The same brokers who market their carrier intelligence as a competitive differentiator, who tell shippers their freight is safe because of the depth of their vetting technology, become, in the wake of a fatal crash, entities with no meaningful relationship to the driver behind the wheel and no responsibility for putting him there. Under the preemption doctrine, this defense was legally coherent, but the marketing copy and the liability defense cannot both be true simultaneously. Either the vetting matters or it does not. The Supreme Court, unanimously, decided that it does.
Industry Response
The transportation industry’s response to Thursday’s ruling has been chaotically predictable: Broker liability exposure will reduce the number of available trucks in the market, sparking a massive truck shortage in the U.S. Brokers will migrate toward large, well-capitalized trucking companies with clean safety profiles and away from the small independent operators that form the backbone of American trucking. Shipping costs will skyrocket. Consumers will pay the price. And so on.
What is seemingly lost in the industry’s response is the logical endpoint of the ruling, the incentive structure. The idea is that if the freight brokerage is forced to share part of the liabilities of the trucking companies it selects, it will implement stricter vetting measures to prevent hiring high-risk motor carriers. Freight brokers will no longer be financially rewarded for willful ignorance. The lowest-rate trucking companies that have absolutely no business on America’s highways will find it much harder to get freight. This is a good thing. These are the trucking companies we see in national headlines after causing a fatal crash, the ones that undercut rates and dissolve and reopen under a new registration rather than attempt to meet the basic compliance standards. When these carriers cannot secure freight, they will eventually be forced out of the market and off our highways.
Yes, there will be a painful adjustment period as the industry works through what defines a safe or unsafe motor carrier and what defensible motor carrier selection actually requires, but the industry will adjust, as it always has. The legitimate, safe American trucking companies that have lost business to unsafe and non-compliant operators for years will, for the most part, no longer be penalized for doing everything right. And the highways that every American drives on, whether or not they have ever thought about freight brokerage, will be safer for it.
Danielle Chaffin is a third-generation transportation professional and founder of Highway Veritas, an independent investigative publication covering trucking fraud, carrier identity schemes, and highway safety accountability. Her work has reached regulators at the Department of Transportation and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
