Targeting of foreign-born truckers risks ‘deepening severe labor shortages’ as thousands of drivers have been taken off roads for failing English proficiency requirements

After moving to Ohio in 2013, Ibragim Chakhalidze’s father set up a trucking company just miles from where two of the country’s major road freight arteries – the I-70 and the I-75 – meet.

Formerly farmers who had come to the US from south-east Russia through a government refugee program, he says trucking has been in his family’s and the wider Ahiska Turk community’s blood for decades.

“Trucking was part of what we did before we moved to the United States, so we continued that here,” he says. Over the past 20 years, the Ahiska Turk community in south-west Ohio, centered on Dayton, has built dozens of trucking businesses in a region devastated by the fallout of the Great Recession.

But after 13 years of working in the industry, that multi-generational link to trucking has been cut. Several months ago, Chakhalidze left the trucking world.

“It was getting tougher and tougher. It’s very tough to find somebody to do trucking. I feel like most of the immigrants went to the hardest [industry], which was truck driving,” he says.

“One of the reasons I sold my truck was because I didn’t have a driver. A lot of people have sold their trucks.”

At a time when tariff uncertainty is driving the cost of imported goods up for all, freight costs are increasing dramatically on the back of the administration’s crackdown on thousands of immigrant truck drivers.

With road freight responsible for 70% of all cargo by weight in the US, ICE officers have been targeting truck stops, weigh stations and immigrant truckers as they drive behind the wheel.

An estimated 9,500 drivers have been taken off the roads in recent months for failing English language proficiency requirements alone.