Thousands of Truckers Are Being Blacklisted Across America – Here’s What’s Really Happening

Carlos Mejia has been behind the wheel for 12 years without a single serious incident. He runs a single truck. He owns it outright. He knows his lanes. He knows his customers, and he has never once had a load refused because of his safety record. Then, on a February morning in 2025, a passenger car cut across four lanes of Interstate traffic [music] and hit him.

Carlos didn’t cause the crash. The police report confirmed it. The other driver received the citation. But, the crash went on to Carlos’s federal safety record anyway. Not because he did anything wrong. Because that’s  how the system works. He filed a challenge. He submitted the police report, the dash cam footage, the citation issued to the other driver.

11 months later, he was still waiting for a response. And now, in the summer of 2026, the freight broker industry is pushing for a federal list, a public blacklist that would be built partly from records like Carlos’s.  If it passes, brokers across the country could stop giving him loads. 12 years of clean driving, one crash that wasn’t his fault, and a system that might take everything he’s built because  of it.

This is what’s coming for American truckers, and most of them don’t know it yet. To understand what is happening, you need to start at the beginning, at the Supreme Court of the United States. For years, one of the biggest legal questions in the trucking industry was this. If a freight broker hires a carrier and that carrier gets into a crash can the broker be sued? The answer depended on where the crash happened.

In some states,  yes. In others, brokers were protected by [music] a federal law called the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act which shielded them from state liability claims. [music] That inconsistency created a two-tier [music] system. A family devastated by a truck crash in Illinois could not [music] sue the broker who hired the driver.

The same family in California [music] could. On May 14th 2026, the United States Supreme Court ended that inconsistency. In a unanimous 9-0 decision Montgomery versus Caribe Transport 2 [music] LLC the court ruled that freight brokers can be held legally responsible for negligently hiring unsafe trucking companies.

Nine justices zero dissent. Justice Kavanaugh, writing in concurrence, noted that brokers should be fine if they acted reasonably and arranged transportation with reputable trucking companies. The bar, in other words, is reasonable behavior. But what does reasonable mean when you are a broker trying to vet thousands of carriers a year with no clear federal standard [music] to guide you? That is the question the freight broker industry took directly to Washington.

And the answer they came up with has the potential to reshape who [music] gets to work and who does not in American trucking. Within days of the ruling, the Transportation Intermediaries Association, known as TIA, the primary lobbying group for freight brokers, filed a formal petition for rule making with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

Their president, [music] Chris Burroughs, made the demand explicit. If brokers are going to be held liable for the carriers they hire, the federal government needs to tell them which carriers are dangerous. The petition [music] has two parts. The first is a Federal Motor Carrier Safety Selection Standard. It would be a clear, uniform set of rules >> [music] >> that brokers must follow when choosing which carriers to hire.

This would create legal cover. >> [snorts] >> If a broker follows the standard and a crash happens anyway, they will have done what the law requires. The second part is the one that should concern every small carrier [music] and owner-operator in America. The Transportation Intermediaries Association is asking the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to publish a public high-risk motor carrier list.

>> [music] >> This list would identify carriers that have exceeded intervention thresholds in three or more safety categories within its measurement system or exceeded thresholds in any of the most critical categories. Unsafe driving, crash indicator, hours of service compliance, or vehicle maintenance. In plain language, a public federal blacklist of trucking companies that brokers should avoid.

And here is where this gets dangerous for the little guy. Stay with me. Because the number you are about to hear changes everything about how you should think about this. This is the kind of story [music] that directly affects hundreds of thousands of working truckers, and it is less than 3 weeks old. Subscribe to Road Kings Unveiled, so you catch it before it catches you.

More than 94% of federally authorized trucking companies in the United States currently operate without a formal FMCSA safety rating. Not some. Not most. 94%. There are approximately 8 million entities regulated by the FMCSA. The agency employs 1,118 workers to oversee all of them. That is one employee for every 7,155 regulated entities.

For context, the FAA employs more than 45,000 people to oversee roughly 7,400 commercial aircraft operators. The agency is so understaffed, it physically cannot rate every carrier. And so the vast majority of small fleets and owner-operators have never received a formal federal safety rating. They are not rated unsafe.

They are simply not rated at all. Under the TIA proposal, the blacklist would be built using CSA scores. The Compliance, Safety, Accountability Measurement System that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration uses to track violations and crashes. And CSA scores have a problem that the industry has known about for over a decade.

They are widely acknowledged to be inaccurate. The crash indicator category, one of the four most critical categories in the TIA proposed blacklist, records every DOT reportable crash a carrier is involved in, regardless of who was at fault. A driver hit by a car running a red light still [music] gets that crash on their record.

A driver rear-ended at a weigh station while legally stopped still gets that crash on their record. The system also allowed violations to stack. Under the old rules, a driver cited for a 14-hour hours of service violation would simultaneously receive a citation for the 11-hour violation that came with it, resulting in two separate penalties for the same underlying event.

It is one of the worst kept secrets in trucking. In 2014, groups as different as the American Trucking Associations and the Owner-Operator Independent [music] Drivers Association, organizations that rarely agree on anything, both asked the FMCSA to take down the public safety ratings until the methodology was fixed.

And in 2015, Congress went further. It legislation, the FAST Act, that barred the FMCSA from publishing carrier percentile rankings publicly, specifically because the data was considered unreliable. Congress banned it a decade ago because the scores [music] were unfair. The TIA is now asking for those same scores to become the backbone of a public federal blacklist.

 [music] And the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s own deputy administrator, responding at an industry event [music] last month, acknowledged that the agency is not, in his words, a ratings agency. There is one more layer to this. What you are about to hear is the piece that closes the circle on Carlos Mejia.

Carlos submitted his DataQ’s challenge, the official FMCSA [music] process, for contesting violations and crash records, 11 months ago. DataQ’s challenges succeed approximately 35% of the time. And that 35% includes the easy cases, violations assigned to the wrong carrier, duplicate entries, administrative errors.

For substantive disputes, the ones where a driver is arguing the underlying event was [music] not his fault, the success rate is considerably lower. In April [music] 2026, FMCSA published a significant overhaul of the DataQ’s process, [music] mandating that the officer who issued the citation can no longer be the sole decision-maker on whether a challenge succeeds.

Independent reviewers must now be involved at each stage. States have until September 2026 [music] to implement the new system. That reform is real and it matters. But it doesn’t help Carlos today. His challenge was filed under the old rules. His crash is still on his record and the clock on the TIA petition is already running.

C.H. Robinson, the nation’s largest freight broker, released an internal memo within weeks of the Supreme Court ruling outlining [music] tightened carrier requirements. The industry is not waiting for FMCSA to act. It is moving on its own. For large carriers with compliance teams, the new requirements are manageable.

For a single owner-operator with one truck and an unresolved crash on his record, a crash that was not his fault, the math is different. Carlos is still waiting for his DataQ’s response. In the meantime, some brokers have already started asking questions he has never been asked before. Here is what you need to understand about where this is going.

The Supreme Court ruling is not going away. The liability is real and brokers have legitimate reasons to protect themselves. Nobody in this story is a villain for wanting a safer industry. But the tool the TIA is proposing, a public blacklist built on data that Congress itself once banned from publication, does not cleanly separate unsafe carriers from safe ones.

It separates large carriers from small ones. It separates companies with compliance attorneys from drivers working alone. It separates the people who have the resources to fight a wrongful citation from the people who do not. There are approximately 500,000 owner-operators actively running in the United States.

The majority of them have no formal FMCSA safety rating. Not because they are unsafe, but because the agency does not have enough people to rate them. Under a system that treats unrated carriers as high-risk by default, all of them are potentially exposed. The trucking community has already noted the obvious counter question.

If brokers want a list of risky carriers, should there be a list of brokers who consistently lowball rates, delay payment, or manipulate contracts? That question is not on the table at FMCSA right now. What is on the table is a petition that could reshape [music] who gets loads and who does not based on a scoring system that even its creators acknowledge needs to be fixed.

Carlos Mejia is still driving. He is still waiting. He is hoping the system catches up with the truth before the brokers stop calling. He may not have that kind of time. The broker blacklist petition is less than 2 weeks old. FMCSA has not yet responded. This story [music] is still moving, and Road Kings Unveiled will follow it.

If you are an owner-operator or small carrier, this affects you directly. Share this video with someone who needs to understand what is coming. And if you want to understand the full picture of what is happening to independent truckers in America right now, start with episode 1. The link is right here.