Harjinder Singh, the Indian immigrant trucker, accused of killing 3 people in Florida after making a reckless U-turn on highway, badly flunked English fluency and road sign tests after the fatal crash, the US department of transportation said. He answered only two out of 12 questions correctly in English language proficiency test by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Singh could only identify one out of four highway signs shown to him, the department of transportation (DOT) said.Despite these failures, he is belived to have entered America illegally in 2018 and was granted commercial driver’s licenses (CDL) in California and Washington state.Sean Duffy, transportation secretary said, “This crash was a preventable tragedy directly caused by reckless decisions and compounded by despicable failures.” “Non-enforcement and radical immigration policies have turned the trucking industry into a lawless frontier, resulting in unqualified foreign drivers improperly acquiring licenses to operate 40-ton vehicles,” Duffy added. The Harjinder Singh controversy has become the latest point of tension between US President Donald Trump’s administration and California governor Gavin Newsom.Singh, an Indian-origin truck driver, has been charged with three counts of vehicular homicide after he made a reckless U-turn on Florida Turnpike that led to a devastating collision of a minivan, killing three people. Singh has been living in US illegally since 2018 after crossing the Mexico border. The viral video has sent shockwaves, triggering criticism.Singh was arrested in California on Saturday by US marshals and is now facing deportation.Despite living illegally in US, Singh was issued a commercial driver’s license by the California department of motor vehicles (DMV). Taking a jab at California governor, department of homeland security (DHS), in a post on X wrote, “How many more innocent people have to die before Gavin Newsom stops playing games with the safety of the American public?”It added that the department is working to free America from illegal aliens. Countering DHS, Newsom’s press office in a post claimed that Singh entered US in 2018 when Trump was president and Newsom became the governor of California in 2019.After entering US, Singh was arrested by the Border Patrol and faced fast-track deportation, but he “claimed fear of going back to India.” He was then released on a $5,000 immigration bond in January 2019 and was given a notice to appear.Since then, Singh has remained in immigration proceedings.“The illegal alien is an Indian national who was granted a commercial driver’s license by the so-called ‘sanctuary state’ of California, whose reckless policies put the lives of American citizens at risk every single day,” said White House.It attacked Newsom further, saying that “instead of acknowledging the tragedy, criminal illegal alien sympathiser Gavin Newsom callously doubled down, claiming that giving driver’s licenses to illegals ‘improves public safety’.”
