Florida Congressman Byron Donalds (R) introduced a new bill that cracks down on illegal immigrants working in the trucking industry following a deadly crash involving an illegal alien trucker that led to the deaths of 3 people in Fort Pierce, Florida.
HR 5177, also known as the ‘WEIGH Act,’ will enforce CDL license and English proficiency checks at semi-truck weighing stations to ensure that drivers are legal U.S. citizens.
“After that horrific crash we started using some of the weigh stations in Florida to also do checks on whether people were able to be proficient in English and also look at their CDL license,” Donalds said in an interview with NewsMax’s Greg Kelly. “So we looked at what the state of Florida did, and we're taking that same action using the president's executive order to codify that into law and allow for the Department of Transportation to use every weigh station in the United States to check for English proficiency with people who are driving these large trucks with a CDL," he explained.
Rep. Donalds called the bill “a common sense policy” and elaborated on the consequences the states can face if they refuse to follow the guidelines set by the bill.
“This is a common sense policy and I would say the schtick is that if you have a state like, let's say, California, that says that they don't want to do that in their state, well, then they're subject to lose federal funding for transportation," Rep. Donalds warned. He added that the bill ensures that states "do what is right" by "making sure that our roadways are protected from illegal aliens."
Last month in Fort Pierce, Florida, a trucker from India, Harjinder Singh, caused a crash that killed three people when he performed an illegal U-turn on a high-speed expressway. The incident sparked debate after revelations that Singh, an illegal immigrant, had obtained a dubious CDL license from California.
Many Florida Republican lawmakers blamed California’s “lawlessness” for allowing Singh into the country and allowing him to obtain a CDL license without any proof of legal US residence.
