These latest enforcement efforts come just days after the Transportation Department said 557 driving schools should close because they failed to meet basic safety standards. The department has been aggressively going after states that handed out commercial driver’s licenses to immigrants who shouldn’t have qualified for them ever since a fatal crash in August.

A truck driver who Duffy says wasn’t authorized to be in the U.S. made an illegal U-turn and caused a crash in Florida that killed three people. Other fatal crashes since then, including one in Indiana that killed four members of an Amish community earlier this month, have only heightened concerns.

Duffy says truckers should be well qualified

States are expected to ensure drivers can speak English before giving them a commercial license, and then law enforcement is supposed to check driver’s language skills during any traffic stops or inspections. Drivers who can’t communicate effectively are supposed to be pulled off the road. A recent federal effort involving 8,215 inspections led to nearly 500 drivers being disqualified because of their English skills. California initially resisted enforcing the English rules, but the state recently pulled more than 600 drivers off the highways.

Duffy said every American wants drivers who get behind the wheel of a big rig to be well-qualified to handle those vehicles. But he said that for too long the problems in the trucking industry were “allowed to rot and no one’s paying attention to it for decades.”

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“Once you start to pay attention, you see that all these bad things have been happening. And the consequence of that is that Americans get hurt,” Duffy said. “When we get on the road, we should expect that we should be safe. And that those who drive those 80,000-pound big rigs, that they are well-trained, they’re well-qualified, and they’re going to be safe.”

More efforts to crack down on fraudulent companies

The campaign will also now expand to prevent fraudulent trucking companies from getting into the business while continuing to go after questionable schools and ensure states are complying with all the regulations for handing out commercial licenses.

Duffy said that the registration system and requirements for trucking companies will be strengthened while Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration inspectors conduct more spot checks of trucks and commercial driver’s license schools.

Officials are also trying to make sure that the electronic logging devices drivers use are accurate, and that states are following all the regulations to ensure drivers are qualified to get commercial licenses.

‘Chameleon carriers’ avoid enforcement

Currently, companies only have to pay $300 and show proof of insurance to get registered to operate, and then they might not be audited until a year or more later. And even then the audits might be done virtually, which makes it less likely to identify fraudulent companies.

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That has made it easy for fraudulent companies that are known in the industry as “chameleon carriers” to register multiple times under different names and then simply switch names and registration numbers to avoid any consequences after crashes or other violations.

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Dan Horvath, who is the chief operating officer for the American Trucking Associations trade group, said this longstanding problem has made it far too easy for companies that have been ordered to shut down to just change their name and registration number and keep operating the same way.

“What we think at ATA has happened over the years is that we have a lack of true enforcement and intervention with motor carriers that are in operation,” Horvath said. Only a small fraction of trucking companies ever undergo a full compliance review with an in-person inspection, he said.

Past enforcement efforts

After that Indiana crash, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration knocked the company that employed the driver out of service and pulled the DOT numbers assigned to two other companies that were linked to AJ Partners. Tutash Express and Sam Express in the Chicago area were also disqualified, and the Aydana driving school that the trucker involved in the crash attended lost its certification.

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Immigration authorities arrested that driver because they said the 30-year-old from Kyrgyzstan entered the country illegally. Authorities say he pulled out and tried to go around a truck that had slowed in front of him, and his truck slammed into an oncoming van.

In December, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration took action to decertify up to 7,500 of the 16,000 schools nationwide, but that included many defunct operations.

Duffy said the companies involved in that Indiana crash were all registered at the same apartment. In other cases, there might be hundreds of these chameleon companies registered at a single address.