• What Happened: Investigative reporter Savannah Hernandez spent a month documenting fraud inside the U.S. trucking industry, exposing CDL mills, unqualified migrant drivers, and what she calls organized transnational crime operating in plain sight.
  • Why It Matters: The DOT has already confirmed states were illegally issuing non-domiciled CDLs, California alone was set to revoke 17,000 of them, and fatal crashes involving improperly licensed drivers have already triggered federal emergency rulemaking.
  • Bottom Line: Hernandez says the fraud goes far deeper than anyone in Washington wants to admit, and American families are dying on the highways because of it.

Investigative reporter Savannah Hernandez spent an entire month digging into the U.S. trucking industry and came out the other side shaken. "I was not prepared for how broken this industry is," she said. "The amount of fraud and legal loopholes was insane."

Her documentary, produced alongside independent researcher Danielle, a trucking industry insider, exposes a system that has been quietly rotting from the inside while 80,000-pound semi-trucks share the highway with your family.

The centerpiece of the investigation is the non-domiciled CDL, a commercial driver's license issued by U.S. states to foreign nationals who do not permanently reside here. The licenses were originally designed for a narrow purpose. What they became is something else entirely. Hernandez describes CDL mills, fraudulent training programs that churn out licensed drivers in days with minimal actual instruction, exploiting regulatory loopholes that nobody in Washington bothered to close.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE FULL DOCUMENTARY

The federal government has confirmed this is real. The Department of Transportation launched an emergency rulemaking in September 2025 after a string of fatal crashes involving non-domiciled CDL holders. California was ordered to revoke 17,000 improperly issued licenses. The DOT found that 53 percent of non-domiciled CDLs issued in New York were in violation of federal law. Border Patrol arrested 87 illegal aliens holding commercial driver's licenses in California alone in a single enforcement sweep late last year.

Hernandez says the problem runs deeper than bad paperwork. "It is organized transnational crime, absolutely," she said. Foreign-run companies are dispatching drivers from overseas, manipulating safety scores, and undercutting American truckers on rates while putting unqualified and in some cases unlicensed drivers behind the wheel of the heaviest vehicles on the road.

The consequences are not abstract. Fatal crashes involving improperly licensed drivers have already claimed American lives and triggered the Trump administration's emergency crackdown on the entire non-domiciled CDL system. The administration moved to remove nearly 200,000 such licenses from the road.

Hernandez's message to every American getting on a highway is simple. "Not being safe on the highways with your families is the greatest risk in trucking."

Someone finally said it out loud. Now Washington needs to act like they mean it.