SafeDRIVE reached Illinois as part of a 26-state English-proficiency sweep. Highway Shield was a separate, later wave, so keep the two apart

What the notice actually said

Illinois was one of 26 jurisdictions on the list, and that is the whole point of this page. SafeDRIVE wave one named Illinois together with Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia and D.C. for January 13 to 15.

Seeing Illinois next to New York, Texas and Florida tells you the sweep was not just a border story. The English-proficiency out-of-service orders in that wave rest on the same 391.11 rule as our June 25, 2025 OOS note: a different operation, the same regulation.

The later Highway Shield wave named Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and Ohio freight corridors and produced a different set of numbers. If a shipper says "Shield hit Illinois in January," two operations have been merged. Two calendars, two names.

Use this page when a customer only remembers "Illinois was in a sweep." The counts live on the companion page. The map lives here.

High-visibility enforcement is meant to be seen. Legal trucks keep rolling and illegal ones sit. Extra time at the scale that week is a cost of the blitz, not a reason to refuse a legal empty out of Joliet.

What it changes on Monday

Our trucks run Illinois every week and we dispatch only legal drivers. Extra scale time is not a fuel surcharge, and it is no reason to panic over a named MC.

Counts companion: 8,215 / 704 / 1,231 / 56. Shield companion: Highway Shield in the Midwest. Our home area: the Chicago region.

Shippers: price the lane with a legal truck. Brokers: the broker packet. We run late in Illinois only if that specific truck is held.

On English proficiency, see our ELP out-of-service and codification notes. We hire people who can do the job in English. Phone: +1 (224) 877-0350.

What we will and will not do

We will run Illinois every week with legal drivers. We will not merge SafeDRIVE's January map with Shield's later corridor wave, and we will not invent an Illinois-sweep surcharge.

We will not treat "Illinois was in a sweep" as a reason to turn down a legal empty. We quote the capacity we actually have.

Dispatch: +1 (224) 877-0350. A person answers when the question is Monday on I-55, not a merged body count.