GEORGIA — U.S. Rep. Mike Collins vowed at a House transportation committee hearing to make America's roads safer by revoking commercial driver's licenses from noncitizens. Collins, a member of the committee and the owner of a trucking business, said he supports the Trump administration's effort to revoke licenses from nearly 200,000 noncitizen commercial drivers.

"If you can't read English road signs, you don't belong behind the wheel. Period." Collins said. In recent years, he described his efforts to keep foreign truckers off the roads as "purely a safety issue."

The Trump administration advanced the policy despite writing that there is no empirical evidence that foreign truckers cause more crashes than U.S. citizens. Collins has also opposed rules that would require his family business to invest in new safety measures for its trucking fleet.

Toward the end of 2023, the Biden administration proposed a rule requiring the installation of devices to limit the speed of trucks to as low as 60 miles per hour. At a transportation committee hearing, he told officials that the federal government should not require trucks to be equipped with speed-limiting devices, saying insurance companies serve as a sufficient speeding deterrent because they can cut off coverage to truckers with unsafe driving records.

"They are called speed limit signs. They are enforced by law enforcement." he said.

In 2023, the American Trucking Associations, which represents 37,000 members including Collins' family business, expressed support for capping the speeds of trucks between 65 and 70 miles per hour. In 2025, the Trump administration withdrew the rule proposing speed-limiting devices for trucks. U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said the withdrawal would get "D.C. bureaucrats OUT of your trucks."

Collins also pushed back against a proposal that would require trucks to have automatic emergency braking systems, which federal officials estimated could prevent more than 8,000 injuries per year. He said the technology was very expensive and did not work well. "People don't understand that these things are actually hurting more than they're helping right now," he said.

Over the past 25 years, crashes involving truckers for Collins' business killed five people and injured more than 50, including one woman who now needs around-the-clock care due to a severe brain injury. Injured drivers and passengers claimed in lawsuits that the truckers caused them to incur hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical expenses. Court filings in one lawsuit state that both parties agreed to a $1 million payout from the business's insurer. In those cases, the business denied wrongdoing by its truckers and by itself.

Collins' campaign and congressional office did not respond to requests for comment about the business's safety record or his policy positions on trucking safety, and his campaign manager declined to make him available for an interview. An employee of his trucking business told ProPublica that press inquiries about the business are handled by his congressional office.