A woman died on U.S. 68 in Ohio on September 2. How the licensing system actually works and how a federal rule passed last year already tried to fix it.

Brenda Watson, 50, of West Union, Ohio, died on the shoulder of U.S. 68 in Pleasant Township on the night of September 2. She was driving a 2012 Chevrolet Cruze southbound when, according to Ohio State Highway Patrol, a 2019 Volvo tractor-trailer crossed into the oncoming lane to pass a northbound vehicle and hit her head-on. A witness told investigators the truck was traveling too fast and had ample time and space to merge back before the crash. The driver, Manjit Singh, 39, of Fresno, California, was arrested and charged with aggravated vehicular homicide under Brown County court records. ICE lodged a detainer with Brown County Jail the following day, according to the DHS press release dated September 9, 2026.

That is the crash. The crash is not what this week was actually about.

On September 9, DHS published on X with an AI-generated image: the Transformers character Optimus Prime, rendered with a DHS seal on his chest, squaring off against a brown-skinned, bearded, turbaned man identified as “Mr. Singh.” The graphic read, in full: “America for Americans. Get off our roads; you don’t know how to drive, Mr. Singh. Self-deport or find out.” “Mr. Singh” depicted a specific individual: Harjinder Singh, an Indian national charged, but not convicted, in a separate Florida crash from August 2025. Harjinder Singh has pleaded not guilty to three counts of vehicular homicide in St. Lucie County. He is presumed innocent.

The government has every right to highlight enforcement actions. Sikh American state legislators issued a joint statement calling the post racist and an act of bigotry against the community. The Hindu American Foundation, the Sikh Coalition, and HinduAction each condemned it. Senator Adam Schiff called the campaign “hateful, disgraceful, and un-American.” California Governor Gavin Newsom called it racist propaganda. DHS shot back at Newsom on X with a video. None of that tells you anything about whether Brenda Watson’s death was preventable at the licensing stage, which is the only question that actually matters for the industry.

The real story runs about thirteen months, and it starts in Florida, not Ohio.

On August 12, 2025, Harjinder Singh, 28, allegedly made an illegal U-turn through an “Official Use Only” crossover at mile marker 171 on Florida’s Turnpike near Fort Pierce, according to the Florida Highway Patrol. His tractor-trailer blocked all northbound lanes. A minivan behind him had no time to stop. Three people in the minivan died. Singh, who had obtained a CDL first in Washington state and then in California, was arrested and charged. Florida investigators later told the Associated Press that Singh had failed the CDL written knowledge exam in Washington ten times between March 10, 2023, and April 5, 2023, and failed the air brakes exam twice. Washington issued him a CDL anyway. California issued him another one.

That testing record is where the licensing story gets real. A CDL isn’t just a driver’s license with a higher weight limit. Under 49 CFR Parts 383 and 384, a CDL is a federally credentialed document issued by a state licensing agency (SDLA) that must meet FMCSA’s minimum standards for knowledge testing, skills testing, medical certification, and, for non-citizens, identity and domicile verification. The system assumed that states would follow those standards. FMCSA’s own 2025 audits found that wasn’t happening. The agency’s Annual Program Reviews discovered that at least five states, Colorado, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, and Washington, had issued non-domiciled CDLs in violation of existing regulatory requirements, according to the interim final rule published in the Federal Register. California had roughly 60,000 non-domiciled CDLs on the books, and FMCSA auditors found approximately one in four were issued incorrectly, according to reporting on the IFR. The problem wasn’t one state. It was systemic.

The non-domiciled CDL is a specific credential: a commercially valid license issued by one state to a driver who doesn’t live there but is legally present and working in the U.S. For years, work authorization cards, Employment Authorization Documents, or EADs, were acceptable proof of that credential. An EAD is a federal document, but it doesn’t specify the holder’s visa category, and it can be issued to people whose underlying immigration status is contested or being resolved. FMCSA concluded that relying on EADs alone left a gap it couldn’t close from the outside: the agency had no reliable way to verify whether the driver behind the CDL had the underlying status that should have made them eligible. That’s the mechanism. States were issuing a federally recognized safety credential without the ability to confirm the federal immigration predicate that was supposed to sit under it.

The Harjinder Singh crash exposed that gap. By September 26, 2025, FMCSA had issued an emergency interim final rule under Docket No. FMCSA-2025-0622 (RIN 2126-AC98), effective September 29, 2025, under a “good cause” exemption from standard notice-and-comment procedures. The rule did one thing: it limited non-domiciled CDL eligibility to foreign nationals holding specific, verifiable employment-based nonimmigrant visas, H-2A, H-2B, or E-2, provable by an unexpired passport and Form I-94. EADs alone were out. Work permits alone were out. States were required to verify each applicant through DHS’s SAVE system and retain documentation for two years. FMCSA estimated the rule affected roughly 200,000 existing non-domiciled CDL holders and 20,000 commercial learner’s permit holders, according to the agency’s own figures in the rulemaking record. A federal appeals court briefly stayed the rule in November 2025, allowing states to continue under prior rules, but FMCSA published a final rule on February 13, 2026, effective March 16, 2026, that reaffirmed the IFR’s provisions with minor changes.

DHS lays out Manjit Singh’s biography as follows, because the dates matter. Singh entered the United States through Arizona in October 2023, where he was encountered by Border Patrol and released into the interior, according to the DHS press release. He applied for a work authorization document in July 2024, which the Biden administration granted in August 2024. He obtained a CDL in California sometime after that. The FMCSA emergency rule didn’t take effect until September 29, 2025. If Singh’s CDL was issued when an EAD was sufficient proof of eligibility, he may have gotten that credential under the prior rules, rules that FMCSA itself concluded were inadequate. That’s not an exoneration. He’s charged with aggravated vehicular homicide, and he’ll answer for it. It is, though, the part of this story that the Transformers cartoon skipped entirely.

California’s AB 60 program, enacted effective January 1, 2015, allows undocumented residents to obtain a standard state driver’s license without a Social Security number. That license is marked “Federal Limits Apply” in the upper right corner and is explicitly not valid for federal purposes, including CDL issuance, according to California DMV guidance. To obtain a CDL in California, a driver must still provide a valid Social Security number, or, under the prior non-domiciled rules, acceptable proof of federal work authorization. The political argument that Newsom’s AB 60 program is the mechanism that put these drivers on the road in semi-trucks misreads how the credential stack actually works. AB 60 gets you a car license in California. The CDL sits on top of a separate federal framework, and that framework’s weaknesses are what FMCSA spent the fall of 2025 trying to repair.

Under the FMCSA final rule (FMCSA-2025-0622), effective March 16, 2026, a non-domiciled CDL issued to a driver who can’t show an unexpired passport and a qualifying I-94 is a credential that states should now be downgrading. If you’re tendering loads, you need to know whether the CDL your carrier’s driver holds was issued before or after September 29, 2025, and what the underlying immigration status was at the time of issuance. That’s a vetting question. You can pull a driver’s CSA record in ninety seconds. You can request the CDL issuance documentation in a pre-qualification packet. If you don’t, and the load ends up on a truck whose driver shouldn’t have had the credential, you selected that risk whether you meant to or not.

Brenda Watson deserved a real accounting of how the system that put that truck on U.S. 68 actually functions.