The southern Ohio community made famous by Vice President JD Vance’s childhood memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” has been rapidly colonized by thousands of migrants from Uzbekistan who run shady, accident-prone trucking operations with glaring red flags for safety violations, The Post discovered.
Locals say the sudden invasion has rattled the quaint, conservative community. One local school district is now 12% non-English speaking students, with most from Central Asia. A sprawling, multi-million dollar mosque also is under construction in tiny Maineville, Ohio.
Dozens of Uzbek-owned commercial trucking companies in Butler and Warren counties operate out of shared residential addresses, log millions of impossible annual mileage and claim to own thousands of phantom big rigs. And they’re exploiting New York’s leftist laws to get away with it.
One company, Badri B LLC, reported on federal Department of Transportation (DOT) paperwork to own 23,001 trucks — all operating out of a single apartment in Loveland, Ohio.
“It’s bad. I first noticed this stuff around 2020, 2021 but it started getting really bad a year or so ago,” one local resident told The Post.
“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,” the concerned citizen claimed.
Maineville — just 25 miles from Vance’s hometown of Middletown — became an overnight freight hub with 267 active commercial trucking companies registered in the village of just 1,500 residents.
Twenty-two residential addresses in Maineville hold two or more trucking companies registered. Industry experts said that’s a red flag for so-called “chameleon companies,” truckers who easily escape their accident-prone, violation-riddled driving record by simply registering a new company through the DOT, usually under the same address and phone number.
Nearby in West Chester, Ohio, one address is home to a whopping sixteen companies. Another West Chester company run out of a single apartment unit, Shod Express LLC, claimed 41 million miles in 2025 across 52 drivers according to DOT records.
That’s a physical impossibility working out to around 854,000 miles per driver that year. A real hard-running solo year is closer to 110,000 miles, industry experts said.
Phoenix Cargo in nearby Circleville claimed nearly 80 million miles in 2026 across 395 trucks on federal reporting documents — another physical impossibility.
“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,” Tom Balzer, president of the Ohio Trucking Association, a nonprofit trade group, told The Post.
“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.”
Balzer said one reason to inflate mileage or number of trucks is to make a company look safer that it really is as they compete for loads.
“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,” he said.
In late August, the Trump administration launched a major joint effort through the DOT and Homeland Security targeting non-citizen truckers, also known as non-domiciled CDLs, who are unqualified to drive big rigs.
Officials announced they shut down 270 CDL (short for Commercial Driver’s License) schools for safety violations, lack of facilities, and failing English proficiency requirements.
Federal officials say at least 30 people were killed in crashes involving non-domiciled truckers in 2025.
At 1 a.m. on July 5, Uzbeki trucker Bekhzod Asrarov of Maineville smashed his big rig into a Honda Accord on Interstate 71 near Columbus, killing 21-year-old Toby Forsythe, an economics major and men’s soccer goalie at UMass Lowell.
According to court documents Asrarov, 42, was unable to communicate in English and faces charges of tampering with evidence after cops said he attempted to hide his dash cam. Asrarov came into the US in 2024 under President Joe Biden’s diversity visa lottery and held an Ohio CDL. He has yet to enter a plea.
In February, just over the Indiana state line from Butler County, illegal immigrant Bekzhan Beishekeev of neighboring Kyrgyzstan plowed into a van carrying 15 Amish construction workers, killing four. Beishekeev, 30, obtained his CDL from Pennsylvania, often cited as another oasis for issuing licenses to illegals, and is currently facing multiple felony charges.
Last year, Uzbek national Bekhzod Rakhmatov, 30, also of Maineville, was indicted in a human smuggling scheme that brought aliens to the US-Mexico border. According to feds, Rakhmatov arranged international transit and border entry and faces up to 10 years in prison. A source told The Post Rakhmatov was allegedly paid up to $20,000 per illegal he helped smuggle into the country.
None of those men has yet entered a plea and none of the trucking companies named responded to requests for comment from The Post.
One creeped-out local who spoke to The Post claimed men sit in their big rigs outside a gym and a popular second-hand clothing shop eyeing young girls who go in and out — and have even solicited some for sex.
The town was shocked following the August conviction of 44-year-old Uzbek trucker Shakrat Abshukurov of Maineville, who spoke no English, after he was found guilty of kidnapping and raping a 13-year-old girl in 2019.
Locals described semis plowing through yards and knocking down mailboxes. They said noise and pollution from the 200 16-wheelers parked at rental lot on Grandin Road became such a nuisance the local township halted a planned expansion.
Screenshots from a Maineville Uzbeki trucker group chat shared with The Post revealed drivers frantically warning one another about roadside immigration checkpoints to avoid — especially if truckers are being inspected for English proficiency.
Ohio requires English proficiency to get a license and does not issue CDLs to non-citizens. Maineville’s Uzbeks organize “taxis” to Brooklyn, NY — specifically a DMV in Coney Island — in order to obtain their CDLs, a source in the community told The Post.
The source said that because New York freely gives CDLs to illegal immigrants, future truckers from across Butler and Warren counties flock to the Big Apple. But the source was perplexed why one DMV in Coney Island became such a destination — citing the nearby Uzbek and Central Asian communities in South Brooklyn as one possible reason.
New York’s CDL issuance to foreign nationals has been a sticking point between Democrat governor Kathy Hochul and the Trump administration. In April, the DOT announced it would withhold over $73 million in federal highway funding from the Empire State for its refuse to revoke CDLs given to foreign nationals.
Last year, 10,000 drivers across the US were pulled out of service for not speaking English, according to data from trucking periodical Overdrive. According to DOT figures, a further 200,000 migrant truck drivers are at risk of losing their licenses after CDL rules were tightened by the Trump administration in March, including stricter enforcement of English proficiency.
In a statement to The Post a spokesman for Gov. Hochul 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.”
