‘Get off our roads, Mr Singh’: US homeland security poster ignites backlash over targeting of Sikhs

TOI correspondent from Washington: The US department of homeland security (DHS) has managed to turn a common Indian surname into the latest flashpoint in America’s immigration wars.In an AI-generated, Transformers-style poster posted on the official DHS X account, a brown, bearded man wearing a head covering is confronted by a giant DHS-branded robot beneath the words: “America for Americans. Get off our roads, you don’t know how to drive, Mr Singh.” The campaign also invokes “self-deportation” and depicts immigration enforcement through the imagery of Transformers characters.The post is part of the Trump administration’s broader campaign against immigrants working as commercial drivers. But the choice of “Mr Singh” -- a surname usually associated with Sikhs and also used by Hindus -- has triggered a backlash among Sikh, Hindu, Punjabi American and immigrant organizations.The Sikh Coalition said the imagery was another example of Sikhs being targeted because of their appearance. The organization has also pointed to the broader climate of anti-Sikh hostility: FBI data show 177 reported anti-Sikh hate-crime incidents in 2025, according to the Coalition's analysis of the bureau's figures.That history gives the controversy a darker resonance. After the September 11 attacks, Sikhs were frequently mistaken for Muslims. Balbir Singh Sodhi, an Arizona gas-station owner, was murdered four days after the attacks by a gunman who said he wanted to kill people associated with the attacks. In 2012, a white supremacist gunman attacked a gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, killing six worshippers.The DHS targeting also irked other Indian groups, with the Hindu American Foundation pointing out that “‘Singhs’ are Hindu, they are Sikhs, they are American and they drive.” It characterized the DHS post as anti-Indian profiling and called for scrutiny of the government messaging.The administration's crackdown on Sikh truckers followed several high-profile crashes involving foreign-born or non-domiciled commercial drivers, most prominently the August 2025 Florida Turnpike crash involving Harjinder Singh that killed three people.Federal regulators subsequently tightened rules governing non-domiciled commercial driver's licenses (CDLs), citing five fatal crashes involving such CDL holders in 2025 and concerns about states' ability to verify foreign driving histories and immigration documentation.But the statistical picture is considerably more complicated than the DHS poster suggests, compounded by a clash between a Republican administration in Washington and a Democrat-governed California. A California DMV analysis covering 2022-24 found that temporary legal residents holding CDLs had 11.9 police-reported crashes per 100 licensed drivers, compared with 14.8 among US-citizen CDL holders. Fatal-crash involvement was also lower: 0.09 per 100 versus 0.12. The figures are not adjusted for miles driven and measure crash involvement rather than fault, so they do not prove that immigrant drivers are inherently safer, but they do undermine any simple assertion that temporary legal residents are disproportionately dangerous.More broadly, federal regulators acknowledge that their crash data does not provide a clean national comparison of crash rates by immigration status. The transport logistics outfit FreightWaves has noted that Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) does not track crash involvement by citizenship or CDL category.Indeed, the Federal Register records Sikh Coalition arguments that non-domiciled CDL holders accounted for less than 2% of large-truck crashes, while more than 98% involved US-domiciled CDL holders. Those figures come from comments submitted during the rule-making process, rather than a peer-reviewed study.Trucking veterans' point is not that immigrant drivers cannot be unsafe; they can, and licensing fraud, inadequate training and language deficiencies are legitimate safety issues. The point they make is that an individual driver's nationality, immigration category or surname is not a proxy for driving competence.Catch the latest World News and Live updates. Download the TOI app.