🎣 Making Amends

Happy Monday. The largest freight broker in North America just started locking carriers off its platform. We break it down in today's feature story.

Plus:

• $160 Oil Is No Longer a Joke
• Mexican Truckers Just Got Their Visas Pulled
• ELD Cheaters Are Getting Hit

🍳 What's Cookin' In Freight

⛽ $160 Oil Is No Longer a Joke. Oil came back above $90 today after sliding nearly 16% last month on ceasefire optimism, but the underlying picture hasn't changed much. Brent started the year at $61 and spiked to $138 in April when Hormuz effectively closed, and the EIA says inventories are still drawing down at 8.5 million barrels a day through Q2. ExxonMobil's Senior VP and Shell's CEO have both said publicly that the market is structurally short, with Shell pegging the shortfall at 1 billion barrels. A ceasefire deal would temporarily take pressure off.

🌎 Mexican Truckers Just Got Their Visas Pulled. The DOT and CBP merged their enforcement systems, and every Mexican driver ever flagged for illegally hauling freight between two US cities got automatically identified and had their visa pulled. Many didn't find out until they pulled up to the border and the system told them to hand it over on the spot. Mexican carriers are only authorized to cross into the US and deliver; the moment they pick up a second load and move it domestically, that's illegal. The Nuevo Laredo Freight Carriers Association puts the number at 3,200 drivers out of cross-border operations.

🚛 ELD Cheaters Are Getting Hit. Arizona inspectors have run 115 driver inspections since April 1 and logged 281 ELD tampering violations, since every falsified day on a log counts as a separate OOS hit under new CVSA rules that took effect this spring. That's 2.4 violations per driver caught. Some of those drivers told inspectors they were running 19-hour days on carrier orders. One dirty driver isn't one problem anymore. Carriers who put manipulated logs on your loads are now facing a 3-year violation stack under CSA.

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C.H. Robinson Started Cutting Carriers

Some carriers in the C.H. Robinson network began receiving a notice last week. Subject line: "Changes to carrier eligibility." The message: your company exceeds intervention thresholds in CHR's scoring model based on FMCSA data. Your account is non-certified, effective immediately. You can't book new freight on Navisphere until your BASIC scores improve.

CHR's notice does not mention the Montgomery v. Caribe ruling from two weeks ago, but the timing is definitely there.

Will Everybody Follow Suit?

The ruling means a broker's carrier selection process is now a direct source of legal liability. Tender a load to a carrier with poor safety scores, that carrier has a catastrophic crash, and the broker can face a negligence claim in state court.

The most important piece of evidence in that case would be the carrier's FMCSA safety data — the same BASIC scores CHR's notice references as the basis for moving carriers to non-certified status.

C.H. Robinson was the defendant in the ruling. They're also the first major broker to take visible action. What the rest of the industry does next is the question worth asking.

Carriers Are Pushing Back

One owner-operator on X said CHR disabled their load board access — initially unsure whether it was specific to them or "something related to the lawsuit."

In follow-up posts, the carrier said their CHR rep confirmed many others are going through the same thing. The frustration: zero out-of-service violations and a clean inspection record still exceeded the threshold. That detail points to the crux of the problem.

A carrier can pass every inspection and still exceed a broker's internal scoring model because BASIC data extends beyond OOS violations alone, and the threshold for what a broker will accept appears to be tightening.

Market Impact

RXO called it plainly in their quarterly rate report: brokers will be "far less likely to use a marginal carrier going forward. Any further reduction of the available carrier pool would contribute to increased freight rates." Tender rejections are already at 16.4%.

This resembles a sorting event. Carriers with clean safety profiles gain leverage as the eligible pool shrinks. Carriers on the wrong side of the line lose access to the largest freight source in North America and need to start managing their BASIC scores like a business metric, because that's what they just became.

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 🌎 Around the Freight Web

🤖 Cabless Trucks Hit Ohio Public Roads. Swedish firm Einride deployed two driverless, cabless electric trucks on public roads in Marysville, Ohio this month alongside Ease Logistics, part of a state-funded $8.8 million corridor project with Ohio and Indiana DOTs.

🌏 Taiwan Just Got Hit With 15% Tariffs. The US finalized the Section 232 deal affecting auto parts, wood, and aircraft parts.

🚛 Trucks Could Soon Haul 91,000 Pounds on Interstates. A new highway bill pilot would bump the federal weight limit on six-axle rigs. If it passes, expect heavy-haul lanes to become much more competitive.

📈 Tender Rejections Are Staying Elevated. Carriers are still saying no. What that means for where rates are heading next is worth paying attention to.

📦 UPS Just Bet $50M on Automotive and Industrial Freight. A deliberate push into two specific verticals. Someone at UPS thinks something is coming in those lanes. Worth watching whether the other majors follow the same path.

🎣 The FreightCaviar Corner

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Freight Humor