“Get Off Our Roads, Mr Singh”: US Government’s Racist Poster

A fatal Florida collision deserved a proper investigation into driving, licensing and enforcement. Instead, the US Department of Homeland Security turned “Mr Singh” into the villain of an AI-generated action poster. That s collective blame with potentially dangerous consequences

“Get off our roads; you don’t know how to drive, Mr Singh.” Imagine opening your phone and finding that message attached to an image of somebody who looks like you, carries a name familiar to your community and is being confronted by a giant robot. At best, you might assume it was a bad joke. At worst, something produced by a far-right troll. What you probably would not expect is that it came from the official social-media account of the United States Department of Homeland Security. And alongside it were the words: “America for Americans.”

There is a fatal collision behind this story. Three people lost their lives, and their families deserve answers. There are legitimate questions about the accused driver, his actions, commercial licensing and the authorities that allowed him onto the road. Those questions require a serious investigation.

What they did not require was a Transformers-style graphic telling “Mr Singh” to get off American roads.

A fatal crash deserved serious answers

The Department of Homeland Security says “Mr Singh” referred to Harjinder Singh, an Indian national accused of making an illegal U-turn in Florida and causing a collision that killed three people.

His immigration status has itself become politically disputed. Florida authorities say he entered the United States illegally in 2018, while California officials have said federal authorities confirmed he was legally present and had a work permit when his commercial licence was issued. What is clear is that he obtained commercial driving licences in Washington and California and worked as a lorry driver.

Start with the manoeuvre. What happened? What did the driver do, and what should he have done? Then follow the chain backwards. Was he properly trained? Was he qualified? Was his competence assessed adequately? Were his documents checked? Did an employer or training provider cut corners?

If the system failed, investigate it and fix it. If somebody broke the law, establish that through due process and hold the responsible people to account. Every one of those actions could help prevent another tragedy.

Instead, somebody apparently decided the useful contribution from Homeland Security would be an AI-generated picture saying: “You don’t know how to drive, Mr Singh.”

Not Harjinder Singh. Just “Mr Singh”.

How one accused driver became every “Mr Singh”

Singh is a name shared by millions. It is especially associated with Sikhs, although its use extends beyond the Sikh community. Put “Mr Singh” beside an image of a brown, bearded man in a head covering and you are using a visual shorthand that millions of people will instantly recognise.

DHS may insist it meant one individual. Social media does not work with that sort of precision. People scrolling past do not pause to study the case file, licensing system or disputed immigration history. They see the name, the face and the accusation. Some jump to conclusions, become enraged and share the image onwards.

Then the next Sikh driver pulling into a truck stop receives the wrong sort of welcome.

The Associated Press reported an industry estimate that Sikhs make up around 20 per cent of America’s trucking workforce, while advocacy groups have put the number of Sikh truck drivers at approximately 150,000. There is no definitive official count, so those numbers should be treated as estimates. AP also reported Sikh drivers experiencing harassment in the aftermath of the Florida collision.

Think about the scale of that community and the service it provides. These are people driving through the night, delivering food, collecting freight, maintaining vehicles, running businesses and spending days away from their families.

Imagine a driver who has done the job responsibly for 20 years. He checks his truck, obeys the rules, takes his breaks and gets the load there safely. Then he opens his phone and sees his government presenting somebody with his name and appearance as a man who cannot drive and should get off the road.

What exactly has he done to deserve that?

Why should a law-abiding driver have to carry the accusation aimed at one individual because they share a surname, skin colour or turban? That is the dangerous absurdity of collective blame.

Driving ability cannot be read from a surname

The insult is particularly galling because it concerns driving ability.

I have not driven in India, but I have driven in Pakistan. Driving there can demand a level of observation and anticipation that motorists accustomed to wider lanes and more predictable traffic might find exhausting and, frankly, traumatic.

You are watching the motorcycle alongside, the pedestrian approaching the road, the bus edging across, the condition of the surface and the possibility that somebody is about to do something you had not considered, only for them to do something entirely different anyway. Traffic lights can appear optional, one-way signs can feel like suggestions and a family of five might be perched on one motorbike.

You need to understand movement, judge space and speed, read intentions and remain calm enough to make sensible decisions with very little room for error.

Put your average American driver, used to familiar roads, wide lanes and automatic cars, into some of those conditions and I reckon they might start hyperventilating before ten minutes are up.

That is not an endorsement of traffic chaos. It is recognition that driving in demanding conditions requires skill. Making assumptions about somebody’s competence based on where they come from, their skin colour, surname or what they wear on their head is both unfair and inherently arrogant.

Commercial truck driving is, of course, a different discipline. A person who can negotiate a packed city street in a small car still requires the proper training to control a heavy lorry. Local rules, road signs, communication and safety procedures matter. All of that can be assessed and taught.

If you want safer roads, demand higher standards. Fund enforcement. Investigate dangerous operators. Test competence properly. Do not racialise road safety.

Road safety requires accountability, not racial stereotyping

Dangerous driving must be investigated and addressed robustly, particularly when heavy commercial vehicles are involved. The answer lies in evidence, proper training, effective enforcement and individual accountability. Racial generalisations achieve none of those things and can create an entirely separate danger.

The legitimate issue	The responsible response	The racialised response	Impact and implications
A driver is accused of causing a fatal collision	Investigate the manoeuvre, examine the evidence and establish individual responsibility through due process	Use “Mr Singh” and a recognisably South Asian appearance to represent dangerous driving	Suspicion spreads from one accused driver to millions of people sharing a name, ethnicity or appearance
A commercial driver may lack the necessary competence	Review training, testing, experience and fitness to operate a heavy vehicle	Imply that driving ability can be judged from somebody’s surname, skin colour or turban	Safe and experienced Sikh and South Asian drivers are unfairly associated with incompetence
A commercial licence may have been issued improperly	Audit the licensing authorities, documentation and assessment process	Blame the ethnic identity of the person who received the licence	Institutional failures escape scrutiny while an entire community carries the accusation
An employer or operator may have cut corners	Investigate recruitment, vehicle management, working hours and safety procedures	Present the driver as a cultural or immigrant threat	Attention is diverted from the businesses and officials whose decisions may have contributed to the risk
Road rules may have been broken	Enforce the same laws consistently against every driver	Turn enforcement into an “us versus them” message about who belongs on “our roads”	Citizenship and immigration status become confused with driving competence
Authorities want to prevent another tragedy	Improve testing, enforcement, training and accountability using evidence from the collision	Produce a provocative, shareable action poster	The messaging generates outrage without delivering any measurable road-safety improvement
Government needs to communicate with the public	Present verified facts, explain the investigation and avoid prejudicing legal proceedings	Turn a human tragedy into entertainment using a giant fictional robot and racial shorthand	Due process and the victims themselves become secondary to political theatre
One individual is accused of wrongdoing	Hold that individual and any responsible organisations accountable	Encourage the public to associate a whole community with the alleged offence	Sikh drivers may face harassment, hostility and suspicion at work, at truck stops and on the road
Public confidence in road safety has been damaged	Demonstrate that licensing and enforcement systems are competent and impartial	Encourage racial profiling by appearance	Law-abiding American citizens and legal residents may feel targeted by their own government
The original post causes a backlash	Explain who approved it, apologise and review the process that allowed it to be published	Quietly delete the image and move on	The mentality and safeguards behind the post remain unexamined, leaving open the possibility of repetition

BrownCarGuy Says: Dangerous driving should be confronted firmly, whoever is responsible. Investigate the driver, the licence, the training, the employer and the authorities. That is how roads become safer. Turning one accused motorist into a racial stereotype merely creates more potential victims while doing absolutely nothing to prevent the next crash.

Why did DHS reach for Optimus Prime?

Somewhere, a government PR meeting must have gone like this:

“We’ve got a serious issue involving commercial vehicles, immigration enforcement and people losing their lives. How should we communicate it?”

“I know. Let’s have a giant robot!”

“Excellent. Give him a badge.”

It would be funny were it not for the potentially dangerous consequences of such ill-considered, casual racism from an official department.

I understand the crude social-media logic. An action-film image stops the scroll. A familiar hero attracts attention. It turns a complicated issue into an instantly shareable confrontation between a good guy and a villain.

That is precisely the problem. A human being becomes the enemy in an action scene. Evidence, individual circumstances and due process disappear behind the spectacle.

Worse, the poster borrows the affection people already feel for Optimus Prime. Generations around the world grew up with Transformers toys, cartoons and films. Optimus represents leadership, courage, sacrifice, compassion and justice.

Hasbro said its character had been used without permission and distanced the Transformers brand from the posts. So a toy company found itself having to remind the US government what its fictional hero stands for.

There is also the deliciously awkward detail that Optimus Prime is an alien. DHS recruited a robot from another planet to tell immigrants they do not belong in America. The original transforming truck toy that became Optimus Prime also came from Takara’s Japanese Diaclone range. Even this supposedly all-American hero has an immigrant backstory.

“America for Americans” but who counts as American?

Then we reach those three words: “America for Americans.”

Does that mean Native Americans? Because if belonging is determined by ancestral purity, an awful lot of pale faces will need to start packing.

Modern America was built by people whose families came from Britain, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, Africa, Asia and virtually everywhere else. A person born in America to Punjabi parents is American. A naturalised citizen wearing a turban is American. Somebody whose family has lived there for generations does not become less American because their face fails somebody else’s preferred visual test.

We hear a version of the same nonsense in Britain: “England for the English.” Which English? Anglo-Saxons came from continental Europe. Before them came Romans, Celts and Neolithic farmers whose ancestors travelled from Anatolia. DNA analysis of Cheddar Man, who lived in Britain around 10,000 years ago, indicates that he had dark skin.

That is where purity slogans collapse into nonsense. Being American is a nationality and citizenship, not an ethnicity.

So who does DHS mean when it says “our roads”? You cannot look across at another driver and see his immigration status. You cannot determine citizenship from a beard or distinguish between a visitor, permanent resident and somebody born locally by looking at a turban.

What you can do is encourage suspicion of all of them by turning that appearance into an official government target.

When official rhetoric leaves the screen

The official who helped publish the picture can close the laptop and go home. The people depicted by it still have to stop for fuel, go to work and face strangers in front of their children.

That should trouble anyone who believes government has a responsibility to treat people fairly. Create enough fear and suspicion around “the other” and eventually almost anybody can become the other.

You might imagine an elderly white British couple on a driving holiday would be about as insulated from that as anybody. Yet Karen Newton said she was shackled and spent six weeks in US immigration detention after she and her husband encountered problems involving vehicle paperwork and immigration status at the Canadian border. DHS disputes parts of the couple’s account and says they had a history of overstaying. Even so, the reported treatment of a 65-year-old tourist raises serious questions about restraint, proportionality and how vulnerable people become once inside such a system.

That example is not the main point of this story. It illustrates the wider danger. Institutions with the power to detain human beings should not be encouraged to see outsiders as convenient villains.

Judge drivers by how they drive

Coming back to “Mr Singh”, one accused driver has been used in a message that casts suspicion across a vast community.

Why should the Sikh lorry driver with a clean record carry that accusation? Why should an Asian family wonder whether they will receive the same hostility? Why should an American citizen have to defend his place in his own country because his government has made somebody with his appearance into a target?

I find that disgusting. The casualness is almost as alarming as the message itself: the action-hero imagery, the insulting line and the official government account. Somewhere in that process, somebody should have possessed the judgement to ask what on earth they were doing.

Yes, the image was removed. But why was it published in the first place? Who authorised it? What safeguards failed? Could it happen again?

Deleting the post does not answer any of those questions. My concern is the mentality that allowed it to appear at all. Childish racism becomes considerably more frightening when the institution publishing it also has the power to detain people.

Many Americans will be appalled by this too, and I hope they demand answers. Sikh and South Asian drivers living and working in America deserve to pull into a truck stop without a federal social-media campaign having helped turn their face into a reason for suspicion.

Most importantly, they deserve to be judged by how they actually drive.

That is the standard I care about on BrownCarGuy: competence, responsibility, awareness and consideration for other people. The US government has managed to produce a driving campaign demonstrating a remarkable shortage of all four.

What do you think? Was this an outrageous case of official racial stereotyping, or do you believe DHS was justified in presenting the story this way? If you are a Sikh or South Asian truck driver in America, I would particularly like to hear about your experience. Watch the full video above and join the conversation in the comments.

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