Uzbek migrant truckers flood southern Ohio near JD Vance’s hometown with hundreds of high-risk companies

Thousands of Uzbek migrants have turned JD Vance’s southern Ohio backyard into a hub of accident-prone trucking firms built on shared apartments, inflated federal records, and deadly crashes.

Maineville, a village of about 1,500 people just 25 miles from Middletown, now hosts 267 active commercial trucking companies, The Post reported, many tied to migrants from Uzbekistan operating out of ordinary residential addresses across Butler and Warren counties.

Twenty-two of those Maineville addresses list two or more trucking firms. One West Chester address alone is home to sixteen companies. Locals say the change accelerated after 2020 and became far worse in the past year.

Federal paperwork shows the scale of the claims. Badri B LLC reported owning 23,001 trucks, all operating from a single apartment in Loveland. Shod Express LLC, run from another apartment unit, claimed 41 million miles in 2025 across 52 drivers, roughly 854,000 miles per driver. Industry figures put a hard-running solo year nearer 110,000 miles. Phoenix Cargo in nearby Circleville claimed nearly 80 million miles in 2026 across 395 trucks.

None of the named companies answered requests for comment.

Crashes leave Ohio families and Amish workers dead

At 1 a.m. on July 5, Bekhzod Asrarov smashed his big rig into a Honda Accord on Interstate 71 near Columbus and killed Toby Forsythe, a 21-year-old economics major and men’s soccer goalie at UMass Lowell. Court documents said Asrarov, 42, of Maineville, could not communicate in English. He faces a charge of tampering with evidence after police said he tried to hide his dash cam. He has not entered a plea. Asrarov entered the United States in 2024 under President Joe Biden’s diversity visa lottery and held an Ohio commercial driver’s license.

In February, just over the Indiana line from Butler County, Bekzhan Beishekeev of neighboring Kyrgyzstan plowed into a van carrying 15 Amish construction workers and killed four. Beishekeev, 30, obtained his CDL in Pennsylvania and faces multiple felony charges. He has not entered a plea.

Federal officials say at least 30 people were killed in crashes involving non-domiciled truckers in 2025. Those deaths sit against a wider pattern of English-language failures on the road. Trucking periodical Overdrive reported that 10,000 drivers across the country were pulled out of service last year for not speaking English.

Tom Balzer, president of the Ohio Trucking Association, tied the safety problem directly to non-domiciled commercial licenses.

Balzer told reporters:

"There’s an impact there. There’s a direct correlation between non-domiciled CDL holders and accidents that they see a significantly higher amount of accidents than those that aren’t."

He added that legitimate carriers want the industry kept as safe as possible and called the current wave the worst he has seen.

Balzer said:

"I’ve never seen it this bad or this blatant. We get videos all the time from drivers at truck stops filming somebody literally tearing off the [vehicle identification] numbers on the side of their truck and putting a new one on."

Chameleon companies and licenses from out of state

A local resident described the business model that keeps flagged carriers rolling. When a company racks up too many violations and cannot get loads, operators simply open a new firm under a fresh name.

The resident said:

"When [a trucking company] has too many violations, and they can’t get any more loads because they’re flagged as an unsafe carrier, they will just open a new company so they can keep going."

Ohio requires English proficiency for a license and does not issue CDLs to non-citizens. A community source told The Post that Maineville’s Uzbek network organizes trips to a DMV in Coney Island, Brooklyn, where New York has been more willing to hand out commercial licenses. Pennsylvania is often named as another easy source.

One local who first noticed the influx around 2020 and 2021 said the problem turned sharp more recently.

The resident said:

"It’s bad. I first noticed this stuff around 2020, 2021 but it started getting really bad a year or so ago."

Balzer explained why some carriers inflate truck counts or mileage on federal forms: the numbers can make a company look safer when competing for loads. The same pattern leaves honest operators competing against paper fleets that exist mainly on DOT screens.

Readers who follow Vance’s return trips to Middletown already know how closely he ties local jobs and safety to national policy. The trucking surge now sits in the same counties he has long described as home ground.

Smuggling charges and a child-rape conviction compound local anger

Bekhzod Rakhmatov, 30, also of Maineville, was indicted last year in a human-smuggling scheme that brought illegal immigrants to the U.S.-Mexico border. Federal prosecutors said he arranged international transit and border entry. He faces up to 10 years in prison and has not entered a plea. A source told The Post he was allegedly paid as much as $20,000 per person he helped move.

In August, Shakrat Abshukurov, a 44-year-old Uzbek trucker from Maineville who spoke no English, was convicted of kidnapping and raping a 13-year-old girl in a 2019 case.

Daily life in the village has shifted with the freight traffic. A rental lot on Grandin Road holds about 200 eighteen-wheelers. Neighbors complained about noise and pollution until the township halted a planned expansion. A multi-million-dollar mosque is under construction. One local school district now reports that 12 percent of its students are non-English speakers, most from Central Asia. Residents have also described men sitting in rigs outside a gym and a second-hand clothing shop, watching young girls and, in some cases, soliciting them.

Screenshots from a Maineville Uzbek trucker group chat, shared with reporters, show drivers warning one another about roadside immigration checkpoints, especially stops that test English proficiency.

Washington tightens rules while New York fights funding cuts

In March the Trump administration tightened CDL rules, including stricter English-proficiency enforcement. Department of Transportation figures later put roughly 200,000 migrant truck drivers at risk of losing licenses. In April the DOT said it would withhold more than $73 million in federal highway money from New York over the state’s handling of commercial licenses issued to foreign nationals.

A spokesman for Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul pushed back, saying policy is set in Washington.

The spokesman said:

"CDL policy is set in Washington, not Albany, and New York follows these federally-issued rules when issuing commercial drivers licenses, something that even the Trump Administration has acknowledged."

In late August the administration launched a joint Department of Transportation and Homeland Security effort aimed at non-citizen truckers holding non-domiciled CDLs. Officials announced they had shut down 270 CDL schools for safety violations, missing facilities, and failed English requirements.

That enforcement push lands while Vance argues the administration inherited deeper fiscal damage from the prior open-border years. Border and licensing failures now show up in Ohio crash statistics and in the paperwork of companies that claim tens of thousands of trucks from single apartments.

Balzer framed the cost in plain terms for carriers that play by the rules.

He said:

"The obvious impact is the detriment to the industry’s safety record. Everyone who’s a legitimate trucking company in this country wants our industry to be as safe as possible."

The same southern Ohio stretch that shaped Vance’s memoir has become a case study in what happens when commercial licenses, federal carrier filings, and immigration screening all loosen at once. Families on I-71 and Amish work crews paid first. Taxpayers and lawful drivers keep paying through higher risk and eroded trust in the system that is supposed to keep big rigs off the road until the driver can read a sign and follow an order in English.

Political fights farther from Maineville still orbit the same vice president. Recent coverage of Cruz’s public clash with Vance over 2028 shows how quickly personnel drama can crowd out governing results. The trucking record in Butler and Warren counties is one of those results.

For voters who watched Vance honor colleagues in the Capitol while still claiming Ohio roots, the contrast is concrete: memorial speeches in Washington, eighteen-wheelers stacked on Grandin Road, and federal forms that list more trucks than a small apartment complex could ever hold.

Open borders and loose commercial licensing did not stay in the abstract. They arrived in a 1,500-person Ohio village, rewrote the carrier rolls, and left bodies on the highway. Lawful drivers and local families deserved better.