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Grey Bull Rescue CEO contests State Department claims on stranded Americans
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The State Department’s account of its evacuation efforts is at odds with on-the-ground reports from private rescue teams who helped extract U.S. citizens from conflict zones during the opening days of the U.S.-Iran conflict.
Bryan Stern, founder and CEO of Grey Bull Rescue, a nonprofit evacuation service, is contesting claims that the State Department offered assistance to every American who asked for it, asserting instead that thousands of U.S. citizens were left trapped by missiles, bombs and security threats crowding airspace in the region.
“It’s not for lack of effort. Our State Department colleagues are tremendous. But their process doesn’t work. There is also no one — there’s no job specialty,” Stern told Fox News Digital, noting a lack of a dedicated government position for handling evacuations.
The contrasting assertions raise questions about the logistical efficiency of American rescue efforts while prompting calls from lawmakers for more specialization to get U.S. citizens out of conflict zones in the future.
Grey Bull founder Bryan Stern, left, pictured alongside a mostly-empty evacuation flight, right. (Grey Bull Rescue)
Stern believes slow-moving bureaucracy is preventing the government from fully utilizing its rescue options.
As one data point, Stern pointed to a video sent to Fox News Digital depicting a mostly empty flight from Israel to Florida near the start of the conflict.
A source, who recorded the video, confirmed they had been evacuated by the State Department from Israel on flight LY1017 from Tel Aviv to Miami, Florida, on March 8 — a point at which Stern said Grey Bull Rescue was being flooded with hundreds of evacuation requests.
In response to inquiries about the video, State Department officials did not address why they had only booked a handful of seats. While the government sometimes purchases individual tickets on a commercial flight for evacuations, they rarely buy the entire aircraft’s capacity, sources familiar with the Department’s evacuation practices told Fox News Digital.
Beyond that particular instance, Department officials said their offers of assistance exceeded the demand on the ground.
Rep. Nancy Mace, left, R-S.C. joined Grey Bull Rescue and its founder Bryan Stern, right, on the ground in Israel during the group’s evacuation efforts earlier this year. (Grey Bull Rescue)
“The State Department has reached out to every American who has registered interest in our support,” a State Department official said. “Most Americans who requested assistance have declined seats when offered, opting either to remain in country or book commercial flight options which offer greater flexibility in terms of destination and luggage.”
Stern believes the answer is misleading.
“That answer is inaccurate in totality,” Stern said.
“There’s a difference between a State Department-contracted aircraft that is filled with Americans to come out and getting them to safety. That’s an evacuation. That’s different from: ‘Hey, go book a commercial ticket. Good luck to you,’” Stern said.
PRIVATE SECURITY FIRM HELPING AMERICANS EVACUATE THE MIDDLE EAST AMID WAR WITH IRAN
Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., who joined Grey Bull Rescue’s operations in Israel last month, applauded government efforts but believes there is room for reform.
“It really opened my eyes to some of the challenges that we have, the bureaucracy that we have,” Mace said.
“I’m going to come back to Washington with some ideas on how to streamline what we currently have and how to ensure that we’re allocating resources to the State Department, to [the Department of Homeland Security].”
Like Stern, Mace suggested that part of the problem stems from a lack of a single position in the State Department that deals with rescue efforts.
Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., said she traveled to the Middle East on March. 8, 2026, after she learned a South Carolina family was trapped in the wake of the Iranian conflict. (Nancy Mace’s Office)
Stern, whose group has worked on over 800 missions to evacuate Americans from Afghanistan, Israel and Venezuela, believes current operations have too many moving pieces.
He said his team’s efforts allow him to communicate more directly with Americans requesting assistance.
“We know them, we talk to them 10 times a day. The current manifest we’re working right now has 338 people on it. We do a Zoom call once a day with all the families. Because of that kind of thing, the chain between the person and the airplane is zero, because it’s us,” Stern said.
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“With [the Department of State] you’re calling a center in West Virginia, talking to somebody reading a script who doesn’t know anything; they refer you to a website that goes to a data processing thing somewhere which gets [put] onto an Excel spreadsheet.”
Over 43,000 Americans have safely returned to the United States since late February, according to the Department of State. Of those, government operations directly assisted 30,000 Americans.
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Why data centers now belong on the critical infrastructure list
Missile and drone attacks that took out cloud data centers in the Middle East underscored a critical vulnerability in the modern economy: reliance on digital infrastructure that sustains competitive advantage and operational continuity for corporations, nations, and militaries.
The outages and downstream disruption were a preview of a new form of strategic and operational risk. Data centers have long been the backbone of the digital economy. What is changing is the scale of dependence as AI workloads dramatically increase the compute power required to run businesses, supply chains, and national security systems.
Artificial intelligence has moved beyond business applications and into the core of warfare and national security. Last month, The New York Times reported that AI is “totally integrated” into the collection of intelligence and its use in strategic decision-making and military operations. Even if AI models are not directly firing weapons, AI-enabled analysis now plays a central role in how modern militaries gain visibility, find insights, and drive action.
That matters because it changes what should be considered critical infrastructure. If AI is a competitive advantage for companies and a battlefield advantage for warfighters, then the infrastructure that trains, hosts and runs AI becomes a high-value target. Attacks on the digital infrastructure organizations rely on can do more than inflict financial damage. They can slow decision-making, degrade logistics and reduce military effectiveness without ever engaging a conventional force.
Historically, nation-state campaigns targeting data centers and service providers focused on cyber intrusions for espionage or pre-positioning. What is different now is the emergence of physical attacks on digital infrastructure during active conflict. Russian military intelligence has been linked to campaigns aimed at digital infrastructure and managed services, often as part of a supply chain attack to compromise organizations at scale. Iran-aligned groups have repeatedly demonstrated willingness to target private sector entities to advance geopolitical goals. In many cases, the objective was access: steal data, implant persistence, map networks, and maintain a foothold that could be used later for espionage or disruption.
What’s clearer now than ever before is that data centers and the AI workloads they support have become so vital to modern society, our adversaries will seek to degrade or destroy their efficacy as a tactic of both kinetic and cyber warfare.
We have already seen how quickly a digital incident can become real-world disruption. On March 11, reports surfaced of thousands of servers and endpoints wiped inside Stryker, a U.S.-based medical device manufacturer. A hacktivist group sympathetic to Iran, known as Handala, claimed responsibility. The incident reportedly halted Stryker’s global production after attackers accessed its Microsoft environment and issued a wipe command via Intune. Even without a single missile, the outcome looked like a strategic disruption: operations stopped and downstream customers felt it.
For business leaders, the imperative is clear: treat operational resilience as a board-level priority in the AI era.
In the world of corporate IT, cybersecurity prioritizes confidentiality: preventing theft of sensitive information. Resilience is a different discipline. It is the ability to sustain operations when systems are degraded, disrupted or actively under attack. For data centers and the businesses that depend on them, resilience comes down to preventing cascading failures and reducing the consequence when something inevitably goes wrong.
These developments carry an important implication for the private sector. Digital infrastructure is increasingly a strategic target, making resilience a core business priority rather than a narrow IT issue. For business leaders, the impact of data center disruption extends into multiple, often overlooked areas of cybersecurity risk.
For example, AI’s growth is colliding with a power wall in many regions where grid capacity cannot scale fast enough. That is driving facilities toward new power dependencies, including on-site generation through distributed energy and renewables, yielding more complex power management environments. This power infrastructure becomes a pressure point as interruptions to power supply or management systems can quickly force a data center offline. Russia has on several occasions demonstrated the ability to target and disrupt power generation and distribution in Ukraine in both 2015 and 2016.
Building management and automation systems, including HVAC and physical access controls, are another. These systems are essential to creating safe and supporting operational environments, but they typically have long capital depreciation cycles and inconsistent security safeguards. Frequently exposed to the Internet, and commonly misconfigured and not properly secured, they can become a pathway to outages by an attacker.
With an increasing density of computing infrastructure, thermal management has become a core environment control in data centers. As the industry adopts liquid cooling for dense AI loads, interference with cooling is no longer a niche technical issue. It is a risk vector that can cause downtime and potential equipment damage if breached by attackers.
Remote access creates another major exposure. Data centers rely on vendors, contractors, and systems integrators for maintenance, monitoring, and support, and each remote connection can become an entry point if it isn’t tightly controlled, centrally managed, and well secured. Adversaries often target these trusted access routes because they can be easier to compromise than a well-defended perimeter, allowing attackers to bypass standard controls and safeguards.
All of this has broader economic implications because data center disruption does not stay inside the technology sector. It cascades into the industries that keep society functioning and supply chains moving: hospitals, electric utilities, chemical production, food and beverage, oil and gas, and transportation. An extended outage becomes missed shipments, halted production, delayed care, safety concerns and lost trust.
What should leaders do now?
Start by defining resilience targets that match business reality: what must stay running, what can degrade, what cannot fail. Then invest in the controls that limit the impact of an incident. Segmentation between IT and OT assets should be non-negotiable. Remote access should be treated as a critical risk pathway with least privilege, strong authentication and continuous monitoring.
Manage facilities systems such as building management systems, power, and cooling controls as critical operational technology, with asset inventories, vulnerability management, logging, and incident response plans that anticipate disruption.
Finally, train to operate under degraded conditions. Tabletop exercises should include scenarios like loss of a cloud region, partial failure of a facility, or compromise of a management plane. Use these exercises to validate that the organization can maintain essential operations and recover quickly when disruptions occur.
Policy is moving in this direction as well. Governments are increasingly treating data centers as critical infrastructure. Policies and frameworks such as the National Cybersecurity Strategy, CISA’s Secure by Design principles, and international standards like IEC 62443 all reflect a growing recognition that digital infrastructure is a national security issue. Companies that get ahead of this shift will not only reduce risk, they will build competitive advantage in a world where downtime can become a strategic weapon.
In the AI era, data centers are essential infrastructure for modern economies and national security. Their rising importance also makes them attractive targets in cyber and physical conflict. Protecting them is no longer just about safeguarding company operations, it is about protecting the systems society depends on every day.
Grant Geyer is the chief strategy officer at Claroty.
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NATO chief says Europeans have ‘gotten the message’ from Trump on defence | European Union News
The US president has accused some NATO countries of not doing enough to support the US-Israel war on Iran.
Published On 4 May 2026
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte says European leaders have “gotten the message” after United States President Donald Trump announced plans to withdraw 5,000 soldiers from Germany.
Trump has grown increasingly frustrated with NATO allies, accusing them of not doing enough to support the US-Israel war on Iran. Speaking on Monday, Rutte acknowledged “disappointment from the US side”.
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list of 3 itemsend of list“European leaders have gotten the message. They heard the message loud and clear,” Rutte said before a European Political Community meeting in Armenia.
“Europeans are stepping up, a bigger role for Europe and a stronger NATO,” he added.
The Pentagon announced the troop withdrawal from Germany on Friday, days after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Iran was humiliating the US during the negotiations aimed at ending the war.
The European Union’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, called the announcement’s timing a “surprise”.
“I think it shows that we have to really strengthen the European pillar in NATO, and we have to really do more,” Kallas said while stressing that “American troops are not in Europe only for protecting European interests but also American interests.”
Over the weekend, NATO spokesperson Allison Hart said officials in the 32-nation military alliance “are working with the US to understand the details of their decision on force posture in Germany”.
‘Dangerous military intervention’
European criticism of the war on Iran has mounted in recent weeks as the conflict sends shockwaves through the global economy due to the continued disruption to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.
Last week, Merz compared the war to previous military quagmires, such as the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
“It is, at the moment, a pretty tangled situation,” he said. “And it is costing us a great deal of money. This conflict, this war against Iran, has a direct impact on our economic output.”
Spain has refused to let the US launch attacks on Iran from its airspace or military bases. Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has condemned the war as “unjustified” and a “dangerous military intervention” outside the realm of international law.
In response, Trump called Spain “terrible” and threatened to end all trade ties.
Despite this, Rutte said “more and more” European nations were now pre-positioning assets such as minehunters and minesweepers close to the Gulf to be ready for the “next phase” in the war.
He provided no details, and European nations have previously insisted they would not help to police the Strait of Hormuz until the war is over.
Increased defence spending
Many European countries have committed to ramping up defence spending in the face of fears over Trump’s commitment to NATO and Russia’s assault on Ukraine – a push underscored by several leaders in the Armenian capital.
“Europeans are taking their destiny into their own hands, increasing their defence and security spending, and building their own common solutions,” French President Emmanuel Macron said.
“We have to step up our military capabilities to be able to defend and protect ourselves,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told reporters.
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Mets rookie Carson Benge makes diving catch in win
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Highlight reel plays have been few and far between for the slumping New York Mets this season, but rookie right fielder Carson Benge had one of the best catches of the year on Sunday night.
Los Angeles Angels second baseman Vaughn Grissom hit a line drive down the first base side in the bottom of the ninth inning with one out and a runner on first. Benge then laid out for a spectacular diving catch, likely saving a run and destroying the Angels’ chances of building momentum for a potential comeback.
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New York Mets right fielder Carson Benge greets shortstop Bo Bichette after defeating the Los Angeles Angels at Angel Stadium in Anaheim, Calif., on May 3, 2026. (William Liang/Imagn Images)
The Mets picked up a 5-1 victory for their 12th victory of the season.
“I dove still not knowing,” Benge told reporters after the game, via MLB.com. “But I know I was going to try to make a play for my guys.”
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Mets broadcaster Gary Cohen described the play as “pulchritudinous,” which left Todd Zeile speechless in the booth. Dictionary.com says that “pulchritudinous” is used to describe something breathtaking, heartbreaking or beautiful.
New York Mets players Austin Slater, Tyrone Taylor, and Carson Benge celebrate after defeating the Los Angeles Angels in Anaheim, Calif., on May 3, 2026. (Jessie Alcheh/AP)
All of the above truly describes Benge’s grab.
At the plate, Benge was 1-for-2 with two runs scored, had an RBI and two walks.
New York took two-of-three from Los Angeles in their series. It was the Mets’ first series win since taking two games from the Minnesota Twins on April 23.
New York Mets’ Mark Vientos celebrates with Tyrone Taylor as Carson Benge reacts after hitting a home run during the fourth inning against the Los Angeles Angels in Anaheim, Calif., on May 3, 2026. (Jessie Alcheh/AP)
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Mets starter Clay Holmes allowed one run on four hits and struck out six. His ERA improved to 1.69.
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‘I can’t feel my leg’: Israeli gunfire disables teenagers in West Bank | Israel-Palestine conflict News
Nablus, occupied West Bank – Islam Madani says families and young people from the Askar refugee camp would once congregate beneath the olive trees on the slopes of Tel Askar, a hilly area in the north of the occupied West Bank which is home to the camp.
“But most won’t go anymore because soldiers shoot so many people there,” the 32-year-old father of two told Al Jazeera.
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list of 4 itemsend of listAmjad Refaee, director of the Askar Social Development Centre, says memories of those killed by Israeli soldiers haunt one of the only green spaces in the camp where children can play.
The military has killed three teenagers there, and maimed many more since October 7, 2023, when Hamas led an attack on Israel, and Israel began its genocidal war on Gaza.
The soldiers no longer fire rubber bullets or aim below the waist, “they shoot to kill, or cause disability”, Refaee told Al Jazeera.
“We are animals to them,” he added. “They terrorise us, kill our young people in cold blood, and keep us here in a prison.”
People from the camp say Tel Askar has become the entrance point used by invading Israeli soldiers as they infiltrate the narrow and dilapidated streets of the camp, often via the illegal settlement of Elon Moreh that looms over the east of Nablus.
It was on the hill where soldiers shot 18-year-old Amir Othman last January, leaving him with a disability. The shooting was almost at the exact spot where his childhood friend Mohammed Abu Haneen was killed by the army just over a year before. He was 18.
‘I asked my uncle to shoot me’
Amir was a promising footballer and dancer until Israeli soldiers shot him in the leg last January as a convoy of jeeps drove through Tel Askar.
He had travelled extensively performing Dabke, a traditional Palestinian line dance.
Amir, now an aspiring nurse, was hauling his wounded friend – also shot by soldiers – to safety when he was hit by a bullet.
“My kneecap and my thighbone were shattered,” he told Al Jazeera.
“I couldn’t feel my leg anymore, so I thought I had lost it.
“The blood felt like boiling water spilling out of my leg.”
Soldiers blocked ambulances from reaching Amir as he lay bleeding. Healthcare officials and international organisations say that has happened hundreds of times since October 7, when Israel intensified raids on Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank, particularly refugee camps.
Amir eventually underwent four operations to help him walk again. He spent four months bed-bound, doctors tell him his mobility will never return to normal.
“When I woke up from the first surgery, I asked my uncle to shoot me, because I thought it’d be better,” he added.
“But I’m learning to accept the situation and keep living.”
Amir said he still dreams of touring, dancing Dabke and running with his friends. “But none of that is possible now,” he said.
The children of refugees
At least 13 Palestinians have been killed in Askar since Israel’s assault on the occupied West Bank intensified after October 7, according to Palestinian monitoring groups. Many others have been shot during the military’s incessant raids.
At least 157 children have been killed by soldiers or Israeli settlers in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem since 2024, according to data compiled by Defense for Children International – Palestine.
Israel denies targeting children, saying its military raids are necessary for security reasons, and to clamp down on Palestinian fighters.
Askar is among the most densely populated of the 19 refugee camps in the occupied West Bank. It is home to 24,000 people, packed into an area about the size of 17 football fields.
It is plagued by unemployment, and many residents live in poverty and suffer “cramped living conditions,” according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
Refugee camps originally were makeshift tented communities intended to provide temporary sanctuary to hundreds of thousands of refugees forcibly expelled from historic Palestine in the Nakba of 1948, when the state of Israel was established.
But as the decades passed, and hopes faded for the refugees to return to their homes faded, the camps became overcrowded, built-up areas.
Amir sat in the camp’s newly established emergency health centre with his friend Yamen Habron, aged 17, and Islam Madani, aged 32. They were also shot by the Israeli military in the last three years, leading to disabilities.
The trio were insistent that no one, no matter their age, is safe when the military storms the camps. They noted the case of 14-year-old Iyad Shalakhti, who was shot dead by soldiers on July 9, 2025, in Tel Askar.
‘No safety’
Islam Madani said he forbids his children – as do many other parents – to play outside in the refugee camp. His four-year-old son energetically patrolled the meeting room where Al Jazeera spoke with his father.
The young boy cries uncontrollably every time the military enters the camp because he knows what soldiers did to his father.
He was shot by a sniper at 7:30 am on January 9, 2024 as he rushed to clock in at the factory where he worked.
“I lost so much blood,” he said. “The paramedic did everything he could to keep me conscious, in case I didn’t wake up.”
He recovered from multiple major surgeries. The shot, he says, went in the back of his knee and out the front, leaving gruesome scars.
He said the army now invades at any time of day and doesn’t distinguish between those fighting against the Israeli occupation and peaceful, unarmed residents.
“Anyone can get shot,” he said. “There is no safety. I was just walking to work.”
Islam is no longer employed at the factory, and cannot stand for long before pain overwhelms him.
He’s been seeing a psychologist to help him process what he sees as the shame of not being able to provide for his family since he was shot and left jobless.
“I became more aggressive, angry and impulsive since being shot,” he said. “I pray to God that better is to come.”
Deliberate?
Yamen dropped out of school very young to support his family through hardship.
The timid teenager was shot twice in the side by soldiers who surrounded him as he reached his front door after returning from the gym. One bullet became lodged in his hip, and the other sliced through his side.
He told Al Jazeera that all he could remember was his father and brother desperately trying to keep him conscious while he waited for the ambulance, which was being blocked by army jeeps.
“All I could remember were my mother’s cries,” he said.
He spent 14 days in intensive care, and doctors spent two days removing the bullet shrapnel. He now walks with a limp.
Centre director Amjad Refaee has known Islam, Amir, and Yamen their entire lives. He says none of them has ever been active in Palestinian fighting groups, as many are in refugee camps.
As they discussed their futures, the young men questioned whether the soldiers had intended to kill them, or whether they aimed to deliberately leave them disabled – to deepen the misery of their lives in the camp.
“Kids in Askar wake up to the occupation,” Refaee said. “They don’t have playgrounds. They can only play football in the streets. Many are forced to work from a very early age.”
Refaee said that his purpose is to keep young people alive by giving them hope, because they are “the future of the country”. “Otherwise we will disappear,” he added. “Which is what Israel wants.”
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Trucking exec warns of unqualified drivers endangering U.S. highways
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A trucking industry insider is warning about a deadly danger rampant on U.S. highways: unqualified, under-trained commercial truckers, many of whom are illegal immigrants and cannot read basic road signage.
In an interview with Fox News Digital, Mike Kucharski, co-owner and vice president of Illinois-based JKC Trucking, issued an impassioned appeal for more investigations into the problem, saying, “This is just madness.”
“You wouldn’t put someone in a cockpit of a Boeing 737 flying from New York to California if they weren’t properly trained or couldn’t communicate clearly or speak English. The same standard should apply to our highways,” said Kucharski.
“Every day, truck drivers are driving alongside school buses, families and commuters just trying to get to work and back home safely,” he continued. “When unqualified drivers slip through the cracks, that creates risk for our motoring public, and you can see that there’s accidents all the time.”
Ohio officials say the semitruck driver charged in the fiery I-71 crash that killed a young family of three fraudulently obtained an Ohio driver’s license and later a CDL under an alternate identity, and the case has now been referred to ICE. (Courtney Hergesheimer/Columbus Dispatch / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images | Facebook)
This week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton launched an investigation into several commercial driving schools in the state for allegedly “endangering Texans by providing inadequate commercial driver training, including to non-English speakers.”
A statement by Paxton’s office said these practices violate federal law requiring basic English comprehension and Texas law mandating adequate training to operate a commercial vehicle.
Paxton’s investigation comes just months after U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced his department had issued more than 550 notices of removal — decertification — to “sham CDL training schools” across the country. A statement by the DOT said the schools were found in violation of federal safety standards.
Speaking from inside the industry, Kucharski said that Duffy and Paxton are exactly right to crack down on the rampant CDL school abuse. He pointed to the ongoing spate of fatalities allegedly caused by individuals holding improperly issued CDLs.
In one recent case, Ohio officials revealed last week that Modou Ngom, a semi-truck driver charged in a fiery interstate crash that killed a young family of three, fraudulently obtained an Ohio driver’s license, a commercial driver’s license and later U.S. citizenship under an alternate identity.
Several months ago, in February, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Indiana arrested Bekzhan Beishekeev, an illegal alien semi-truck driver issued a commercial driver’s license by Pennsylvania. The Department of Homeland Security said that Beishekeev allegedly killed four people on Feb. 3, when he swerved into oncoming traffic and struck a van in a head-on collision.
In Oregon, ICE also recently arrested Indian illegal immigrant Rajinder Kumar, who is accused of jackknifing his semi-truck and trailer, blocking both lanes of traffic, causing a crash that killed a newlywed couple.
There have been several other high-profile traffic fatalities involving illegal immigrants and improperly issued CDLs that have rocked the nation in recent months.
“This is just madness what’s happening,” he said, adding, “It has to stop because the longer this continues, there’s going to be more accidents, more people that are going to perish.”
ICE ARRESTS 13 AFTER TIP ON TRUCK DRIVERS AT PENNSYLVANIA DMV SPARKS CHAOTIC SCENE
Left to right: Modou Ngom, Rajinder Kumar and Bekzhan Beishekeev. Background: The crash site on Indiana Highway 67 allegedly caused by Beishekeev. (Delaware County Jail; DHS; DHS)
Besides the danger posed to U.S. citizens on the roads, Kucharski said the abuse has been crushing the commercial trucking industry, and by extension, causing disruptions to the U.S. supply chain and impacting prices.
“This is an economic issue, not just a safety issue,” he emphasized. “When unqualified drivers get on the road, it doesn’t just increase risk, it drives up the insurance costs, which has already risen for all of us; our insurance keeps going up, lawsuits, ultimately prices for the consumers.”
Kucharski has previously blown the whistle on illegal immigrants carrying sanctuary state licenses, sending a “shockwave” through the industry by edging out qualified, legitimate American drivers who require higher salaries.
He explained that illegal immigrant truck drivers can exploit a “loophole” in the system by obtaining non-domiciled commercial drivers’ licenses from states such as California and New York. They are then able to outcompete legitimate trucking businesses by charging lower prices, leading to the demise of many American small businesses in the industry.
“All our truckers are fighting for the same load, and it goes to the lowest bidder,” he went on. “If you have these drivers coming in that are non-domiciled, they have no family here, they have no home, they live in their truck… They’re saying, ‘OK, look, all the market’s doing for $2,000, we’ll do it for $1,700.’ So, it’s putting small trucking businesses out of business every day.”
Regarding the CDL schools certifying unqualified drivers, Kucharski confirmed, saying, “They’re putting bad actors in there, and they’re causing chaos in the trucking industry.”
“It’s just a huge black eye to the trucking industry,” he said.
JKC Trucking Vice President Mike Kucharski encouraged other trucking owners to “jump in and join the fight” against the abuse, which he referred to as an “abomination.” (Noah Berger/AP Photo)
“This investigation is absolutely necessary,” he continued. “It’s about protecting the American public and restoring trust in the industry.”
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He encouraged other trucking owners to “jump in and join the fight” against the abuse, which he referred to as an “abomination.”
“This driving school nightmare keeps me up at night,” he admitted. “Our job as owners is to educate everyone else that is not familiar, so we can come up with solutions together that keep the wheels rolling and the U.S. Economy roaring.“
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