The Texas Senate Transportation Committee heard testimony last Tuesday that illegal immigration and weak commercial-license checks have put unvetted foreign drivers on Texas highways and pushed citizen truckers out of work.
Chairman Tan Parker opened the hearing after a federal audit found nearly half of the sampled licenses given to foreign-domiciled drivers stayed valid after their legal work papers expired. Texas later pulled thousands of those licenses and stopped most new ones.
Harvey Beecher, co-founder of American Truckers United and a third-generation trucker whose family has been in the business since 1981, told senators Texas has become “the hotbed of cabotage.”
Witnesses pointed to a March 2025 crash on Interstate 35 in North Austin. An 18-wheeler driven by Solomun Weldekeal-Araya, an Ethiopian refugee, hit stopped traffic at highway speed and killed five people, including an infant, a young child, and a 78-year-old woman. The NTSB later found that Texas had issued him a regular CDL rather than a non-domicile license. That license should have expired with his work permit in October 2022, years before the wreck.
Beecher said the federal government “gave work authorization permission slips at our border for illegal aliens to come in and displace American citizen truckers.” He said companies based in the United States have been hiring foreign drivers on the wrong visas, taking the local Texas Triangle runs that once let citizen drivers get home every night. Those men, he said, now take lesser jobs or go over the road and miss “their children’s ball games.”
Chris Russo, president of Texans for Strong Borders, said the Austin crash showed how dangerous the licensing failures have become. He told senators that Texas-based carriers lead the country in English-proficiency violations and that some operators are putting drivers with Mexican licenses and other foreign credentials to work inside the state. “We’d like to work with you all to solve these problems and keep our roads safe and protect our American truckers,” Russo said.
Prohibiting Non-domiciled CDLs and other restrictions on foreigners operating commercial vehicles are expected to be a hot-button issue in the 90th legislative session.