By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor
Harjinder Singh is a 28-year old Indian national who illegally entered the United States in 2018, by crossing north from Mexico (how he got to Mexico in the first place has not been addressed) during the first Trump administration, when the Democratic Party was still successful in blocking many of President Trump’s efforts to secure the border.
Arriving seven years ago, this then-21-year-old illegal alien looked – illegally – for a job as a truck driver, and unfortunately, he was eventually able to obtain a commercial driver’s license (a CDL) in California, a state that routinely disregards federal law on principle, despite his utter inability to read road signs or answer test questions.
(Governor Newsom’s office tried hard at first to blame the federal government for an error in identifying Singh as ineligible, but since driver testing and certification of language proficiency before issuing a CDL are state responsibilities, with the state empowered to act as a competent authority on behalf of the federal government, this effort to deflect criticism by blaming this one on Washington D.C. is without merit).
Apparently on a cross-country drive for his west coast employer, Mr. Singh was driving on a Florida divided highway on August 12, when he decided to make an extremely illegal move: a U-turn from the right lane, crossing over and utilizing a state service path (the kind of gap in a divided highway that’s always reserved to the police and highway service workers, and clearly marked as such), without paying attention to the rest of the traffic.
Three innocent people were in a minivan behind him that unfortunate day, and when he suddenly swung around, jack-knifing his rig, he caused the minivan to crash directly into the truck. He and his passenger walked away, and even flew back to California; all three innocents in the minivan were killed.
Singh is of course facing multiple charges – including three cases of vehicular homicide and three cases of manslaughter – on top of the existing charges of illegal presence in the country and the questionable circumstances of his obtaining such a job.
Tragically, with our country suffering from open borders for so long, and with enforcement of many related laws being so lax in so many states, this story might not even have made the national news, were it not for an unexpected array of petitions in support of the alien, on Change.org and elsewhere, that attracted over 2.7 million signatures in the first two weeks (though of course, how many of those are legit, and how many are even here in the USA, are unknowns).
Those of us who watch how public opinion has been manipulated since the days of the Michael Brown and George Floyd riots should quickly recognize the pattern: a patently guilty perpetrator is rightly arrested for his crimes, and the Left dismisses the criminal’s many victims, claiming that the arrest is an overreaction, a persecution of a minority, that it is somehow proof of “inherent bigotry in a hostile system.”
The various petitions in support of Mr. Singh declare that it was an accident, after all, so he shouldn’t be charged with homicide, and imply that there is racism involved in his prosecution, beginning with his status as an illegal, and possibly even focused on his nationality as an Indian.
A sensible consumer of the news can dismiss such charges immediately. While the specific statutes vary from state to state, vehicular homicide and manslaughter are the logical charges to start with when any driver causes a crash resulting in fatalities. These would be the charges whether he were black or white, Indian or Italian. The charges are color-blind, and may well be changed, upward or downward, as a trial date approaches and further information is discovered.
You certainly don’t start petitioning for clemency for the driver before the bodies of his victims are even cold – but these activists did. They wasted no time, rallying support for this man on social media and Change.org.
This story is a perfect example of so many of the problems from which our nation currently suffers, and of our resulting political polarity.
The job market: Real wages have been in decline for most of the past few decades, pushing the American Dream further out of reach for most of the country. While high tax rates and the loss of manufacturing are rightly identified as two of the main reasons for this, the multitude of illegal aliens in the workforce is a prominent third, pushing down the average wage and reducing job opportunities for citizens and legal immigrants.
The economy in general: Illegal aliens are not all identical, of course, but some generalities can be stated. Since they live and work in the shadows, illegals don’t tend to participate in the tax base as fully as the rest of us do; they don’t pay into the insurance pools (auto, health, homeowners, etc.) as fully as the rest of us do; their very presence causes their employers to become more comfortable dodging the law as well. So even though the Left will say “they pay taxes too!” just because they pay sales taxes when they buy something or they may have payroll tax withheld on a stolen Social Security number, the illegal alien population is still an immense net cost to the system, driving up the tax rates and insurance rates that the law-abiding public – both citizen and legal green card or visa holder – must pay.
The manipulation of public opinion: The press has never been fully objective; even in the Founding era, newspapers were known to be supporters of one party or the other. But the degree of spin today is unprecedented. The attempt to seize on this story as proof of anti-Indian bigotry (in a nation that happily grants visas to a plethora of legal Indian immigrants in such professional careers as medicine, engineering and I.T., no less!) is a perfect example of the American Left’s constant effort to imagine racism where none exists. The problem here is that Harjinder Singh turned out to be a lethally careless driver and an illegal alien, who shouldn’t have been behind the wheel that day, no matter what color he was.
The blue state defiance of federal law and safe practices: Federal law has required English proficiency for all commercial truck drivers for generations. Many states, including California, have dismissed this law, as if to maintain that everyone deserves to drive an 80,000 lb rig down a crowded highway, without concern for ability to read such signs as “Service Road – No Entry” or “No U-Turns.” By granting the undeserving these CDLs, despite a lack of language proficiency and a failure to respect (or even understand) the rules of the road, these states share the guilt for many of the highway accidents that endanger the American public every day.
The Trump administration is trying – on so many fronts – to right the ship of state that has been led so far astray for so long.
We – the public, the consumers of news – have to be more vigilant than ever before, as we are confronted daily with news stories and PR efforts that wander so far from reality.
A thug assaulted a Ferguson shopkeeper and attacked a policeman, and St. Louis burned as that story was spun into a malicious fiction. Another thug was dying of a drug overdose and held by an innocent policeman while awaiting an ambulance, and Minneapolis burned as that web of half-truths and lies was spun. The same formula has been applied, again and again.
Now a careless truck driver’s error has caused three innocents to die, and you can be sure, that same movement is salivating at the prospect of spinning this one to make Florida look racist. Millions of marxists and their gullible followers have already begun the effort.
To paraphrase the Founders, the price of a free press is eternal vigilance.
Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo
