A Georgia congressman running for one of the country’s most competitive U.S. Senate seats has vowed in social media posts and interviews to make America’s roads safer — by taking commercial driver’s licenses away from noncitizens.
“If you can’t read English road signs,” Mike Collins, a Republican, posted on Facebook in April, “you don’t belong behind the wheel. Period.”
Collins, the owner of a trucking business and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives’ transportation committee, is one of the loudest champions of the Trump administration’s effort to revoke licenses from nearly 200,000 noncitizen commercial drivers, including thousands of truckers. The Trump administration has pushed the policy forward even though its own officials have written that there’s no empirical evidence to show that foreign truckers cause more crashes than truckers who are American citizens.
At the same time, however, Collins has opposed rules that experts say actually would reduce the odds of serious crashes. Those rules could have required that Collins’ family business sink substantial money into new safety measures for its fleet.
Over the past 25 years, crashes involving truckers for Collins’ business killed five people and injured more than 50 people — including one woman who now needs around-the-clock care due to a severe brain injury — according to federal data, court filings, plaintiffs’ attorneys and police records.
Drivers and passengers who were injured in those crashes later claimed in lawsuits that truckers for Collins’ business have caused them to collectively incur hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical expenses. The figure the business has paid out is not known because the settlements it reached with crash victims have been confidential, as is common in such suits. Court filings in one suit state that both parties agreed to a $1 million payout from the business’s insurer. Collins’ business denied wrongdoing by truckers and the business itself in those cases.
ProPublica’s analysis of federal motor vehicle data from the past two years shows that Collins’ business has a higher rate of unsafe driving and speeding violations per mile than the majority of trucking companies with substantial mileage. The analysis also shows that the company’s recent crash rate sits around the median of similar companies, while the rate of injury from those crashes sits in the top fifth.
Safety experts told ProPublica that some of the technologies opposed by Collins, which include devices on semitrucks to limit their speed and sensors on big rigs to automatically brake in the face of a potential collision, reduce the odds of crashes leading to serious injuries and deaths. The country’s largest trucking trade group — a group that Collins’ family business is a member of, according to the company’s website — has supported mandates for those technologies.
“These are proven technologies,” said Zach Cahalan, executive director of the Truck Safety Coalition, which advocates on behalf of crash victims and their families. He added that the technologies would “protect those we hold dear on our roads from horrific tragedy.”
Neither Collins’ campaign nor his congressional office responded to ProPublica’s requests for comment or to questions about his family business’s safety record or his policy positions on trucking safety.