Red States Team Up To Fight Illegal Immigrant Truckers

More than a dozen red states have coordinated a crackdown on illegal immigrant truck drivers to keep them from avoiding law enforcement by rerouting through other states.

Tim Tipton, the commissioner of the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety, said at a news conference Monday that when state troopers began targeting illegal truckers alongside federal authorities, social media posts began popping up telling the foreign drivers to “divert” and avoid Oklahoma.

“We knew that this was a problem and the illegal truck drivers would just end up going around us. So we reached out to 14 other states and asked them if they would be willing to do the same type of enforcement effort that we’re gonna do at the same time … to prevent this simply trying to divert around Oklahoma,” Tipton said.

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Participating states include Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, South Dakota, North Dakota, Arkansas, Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Texas, and Missouri, among others.

Over a 72-hour period last week, authorities across the red states, along with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, arrested more than 230 illegal immigrants, including more than 40 with commercial driver’s licenses, in an expansion of Oklahoma’s “Operation Guardian,” which the Department of Homeland Security touted Monday.

Among those arrested were illegal immigrants from Armenia, Brazil, China, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Mongolia, Peru, and Ukraine. Many of them were released into the country under the Biden administration.

“We feel it’s critical to do these operations,” Tipton said, adding, “Our goal is to continue to do these until either trucking companies that are hiring these people, the brokers that are using these trucking companies that are not professional go out of business, and we take every one of these untrained, illegally here people out of driving these trucks and putting all of our motoring citizens in jeopardy.”

During the recent operation, a trooper pulled over a vehicle carrying five adult men under investigation for human trafficking and a 17-year-old girl who came across the border alone under the Biden administration. All of the vehicle occupants were in the country illegally and had deportation orders.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said federal authorities had been searching for the girl.

“We had been looking for her. Because of this operation, we were able to locate her,” Mullin said.

In another instance, a trooper caught an illegal immigrant behind the wheel of a stolen vehicle. The Honduran national allegedly assaulted the officer, leaving him with a dislocated elbow and a broken arm, before fleeing the scene.

After a four-hour manhunt, authorities captured him and found that he had methamphetamine.

“This is a huge public safety issue in Oklahoma. When it comes to somebody driving an 80,000-pound truck who has not been trained properly, can’t read and speak English, and we’ve seen the devastating effects of this around the country,” Tipton said.

Many of the illegal immigrant truckers caught in Oklahoma had felony warrants, domestic assault cases, and multiple DUI cases, Tipton said. Some of them were actively committing crimes when they were caught.

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