The 20-year-old was fitted with a tracking device under a Trump administrative initiative targeting Haitians in Springfield, Ohio.
Page A2From§Eachthe milkman edition — 2 September 2026
Immigration hardliners warn immigrant truckers endanger public; their own ankle monitor drives a student to death.
As it ran on the front
I had it here somewhere. Hold on — here it is, I wrote it on the back of a toll receipt, because that's what was in the glovebox when I heard it on the radio. Two headlines, same week, same wire. One says immigrant truck drivers are a danger to the public and somebody ought to be watching that. The other says a student — an actual kid, in school, with a court date coming — died after months on an ankle monitor, the government's monitor, the one that's supposed to keep track of him until that date arrives. I wrote the word 'monitor' down twice on that receipt and circled it both times. I don't know why you circle a word. Seemed like the kind of thing you circle.
Now, I've got a monitor of my own, more or less — the oil pressure gauge on the car, which has been sitting low for about eight months now. I keep meaning to get the fan belt looked at. I don't, because the car still starts, mostly, and a low reading isn't a dead engine, not yet. That's what a monitor's supposed to do. It tells you something's off. It doesn't fix it. It doesn't punish you for it. It just sits there, reading, and it's on somebody to act on the reading.…
…(cont) So I got to thinking about the kid's monitor. That one wasn't reading oil pressure. That one was reading where he was, all day, every day, and reporting it back to somebody. And that one doesn't fix anything either. It just tells somebody something. The question I wrote down, and I'm reading it right off the receipt, is: who's on the other end of that particular gauge, and what are they supposed to do when it reads low. Because from where I'm sitting, it read low for months, and nobody looked at the belt.
Meanwhile I read the other piece twice, out on the porch, because the light's better out there in the evening. That one's about the trucking companies — cheap labor, deadly consequences, that's the phrase they used. It says the companies are the ones benefiting from the arrangement. It doesn't ask, anywhere in it, whether the company doing the hiring has a monitor of its own — whether anybody's watching the rate per mile, the hours logged, the corners cut to keep the price down. The monitor everybody's worried about in that piece is strapped to the driver. Nobody in it is asking about a monitor on the company.
So here's what I've got, written down plain: two monitors, two different people, same week's wire. One ends with a kid missing a court date he was never going to make it to. The other ends with a call for Congress to look harder at the drivers. I circled the word twice and I still don't have a good reason why, except that when the same word turns up in two stories about who gets tracked, and it's never once used on the ones cutting the checks, I tend to write it down and leave it be. I try not to write down the ones I can't answer.
Oh — before you go. That piece on the trucking companies, I've got it right here. It says, plain as anything, who benefits from the arrangement. Who does it say that is?
“They run the piece warning that immigrant truck drivers are the danger, on the same wire day a kid dies because their own tracking device made his life unlivable — the danger they're so worried about is the one their own system built. Nobody signs up to wear a monitor; somebody signs the contract to put it on somebody else, and it isn't the kid who profits from that arrangement.”
“Commercial driving standards are a completely separate issue from immigration enforcement, they're not related in any way. Well — they might be a little related, that's sort of the argument the piece is making. I'll need to check with the desk on this one.”
The receipts
‘Behind the wheel of an 80,000-pound lethal weapon’
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.