A U.S. Senate Candidate Says Foreign Truckers Are Making America’s Roads Unsafe. His Own Truckers Have Caused Harm.

Why It Matters

The contrast between Collins’ safety rhetoric and his company’s poor safety record raises questions about policy motives and highlights the need for data‑driven road‑safety regulations rather than politically driven immigration restrictions.

Key Takeaways

• Collins' fleet shows higher unsafe‑driving rates than ~80% of peers
• Federal data shows his trucks caused five deaths and 50+ injuries
• He opposes speed‑limiter and automatic‑braking mandates supported by industry
• Trump rule to revoke 200k non‑citizen CDLs lacks safety evidence
• ProPublica analysis covers 7 million miles driven by Collins’ company (2025)

Pulse Analysis

Mike Collins has turned his decades‑long trucking background into a political selling point, promising to make America’s highways safer by targeting non‑citizen commercial drivers. The narrative taps into broader immigration debates and aligns with a Trump‑era policy that would strip CDLs from roughly 200,000 foreign‑born drivers. Yet the administration’s own analysis admits there is no statistically significant link between a driver’s citizenship status and crash outcomes, undermining the premise of the rule and opening the door for legal challenges from states and advocacy groups.

A deep dive into federal motor‑carrier safety data paints a starkly different picture of Collins’ own operations. Over a two‑year window, his company logged about 7 million miles, yet its per‑mile rates for unsafe driving and speeding violations sit above 80% of peers, and its crash‑injury rate ranks in the top fifth. The firm’s history includes five deaths and more than 50 injuries, with settlements reaching six‑figure sums. Simultaneously, Collins has resisted industry‑backed safety technologies—speed limiters and automatic emergency braking—that have been shown to cut serious injuries by thousands of cases annually.

The clash between Collins’ safety rhetoric and his business record underscores a broader tension in transportation policy: whether safety should be driven by evidence‑based regulations or political expediency. Industry groups like the American Trucking Associations support the very technologies Collins opposes, citing cost‑benefit analyses that favor adoption. As the Senate race tightens, voters and regulators will weigh the credibility of safety claims against hard data, while courts evaluate the legality of the non‑citizen CDL revocation rule. The outcome could reshape both immigration‑related licensing policy and the future of safety technology mandates in the U.S. trucking sector.