Over two million people have signed a petition urging leniency for an Indian illegal immigrant truck driver charged with killing three people in a crash in Florida. Harjinder Singh, 28, has been charged with three counts of vehicular homicide for the deadly crash.
Singh could now face up to 45 years in prison after allegedly making an illegal U-turn on the Florida Turnpike on August 12 while operating a tractor-trailer — six years after entering the U.S. illegally. Since his arrest in California, a Change.org petition urging Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to reduce Singh’s sentence if he is found guilty had accumulated a whopping 2.2 million signatures as of Sunday morning.
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“This was a tragic accident — not a deliberate act. While accountability matters, the severity of the charges against him does not align with the circumstances of the incident,” the petition reads.
Manisha Kaushal, who launched the petition, signed it as “Collective Punjabi youth,” with many of the supporters leaving comments appearing to be Indian nationals.
“It was an accident. he made a terrible mistake, not a deliberate choice to harm anyone. He was working hard to support his family, like so many of us, and one wrong decision changed everything. A 45-year prison sentence is not justice,” one commenter, Marvi, based in Sydney, Australia, wrote.
“45 yrs of imprisonment?? is it fair for a young boy who left his home country to have bright future, support family???” a second user based in Mississauga, Ontario, wrote.
Singh’s relatives from his hometown in Punjab, India, have also voiced their concerns following his arrest, pleading that he be given a lighter sentence.
“His age is 28 years, and if he gets 45 years of jail, then you can imagine what will be the condition of his family,” relative Dilbagh Singh told the Times of India, speaking from the village of Rataul, close to the Pakistani border.
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Indian lawmakers have also joined the debate after Secretary of State Marco Rubio suspended commercial truck driver visas in response to the fatal accident. After Rubio declared that foreign truckers were “endangering American lives and undercutting the livelihoods of American truckers,” an Indian parliamentarian said the decision would unjustly single out the Punjabi community.
“Punjabi and Sikh drivers make up 20% of the United States’ trucking industry. Any mass-level action against them would have a detrimental effect on trucking families and would be discriminatory,” Harsimrat Kaur Badal, a lawmaker for the Punjabi-nationalist party Shiromani Akali Dal told the Times of India.
After the crash, Singh fled to California but was later captured by U.S. Marshals and extradited to Florida to stand trial.
In Florida, each vehicular homicide charge carries a penalty of up to 15 years, which means Singh faces a possible 45-year prison term.
Records suggest that Singh entered the U.S. illegally in 2018 after mortgaging his farmland in India.
At that time, Singh was arrested by Border Patrol but later released on a $5,000 bond, with his immigration case still unresolved when the fatal crash occurred.
He told an immigration judge that he feared severe violence if forced to return to India, which allowed him to remain in the U.S. and work while his case proceeded through the courts. However, the Department of Homeland Security has now labeled Singh “a serious threat to public safety” because of the deadly accident and denied him bond on Saturday.
