Examining authenticity of petition seeking clemency for truck driver in deadly Florida U-turn crash

In August 2025, a claim (archived) circulated online that millions of people signed a petition calling on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to grant clemency to Harjinder Singh, a truck driver accused of causing a crash that killed three people in Florida.  

As of this writing, Singh faces (archived) three charges of vehicular homicide and three manslaughter charges after a minivan collided with the commercial semi-truck he was driving on the Florida Turnpike on Aug. 12, 2025, killing all three people in the minivan. Authorities said Singh lacked legal status in the U.S. at the time of the crash.

One Instagram post about Singh's case used the hashtag #westandwithharjindersingh and claimed more than three million people had signed the petition.

The claim also circulated on X (archived), Facebook (archived), Threads (archived), Bluesky (archived) and Reddit (archived), and Snopes readers searched our site to ask if the rumor was true.

According to Change.org, a website that hosts online petitions, more than three million people, as of this writing, had signed an appeal (archived) titled: "Free petition !!! Plea for Fair Sentencing." That petition asked DeSantis to grant clemency and thereby a more lenient sentence for Singh.

Singh's family and friends in India's Punjab state reportedly called for a less severe sentence, while one Indian politician (archived) said that "a grave mistake by one driver which had resulted in a fatal accident should not be used to punish the entire [Punjabi truck driver] community."

While the petition did exist, Snopes could not independently verify the identity of Manisha Kaushal, the purported petition starter. It was not possible to locate Kaushal online, nor did they appear to have posted about the petition anywhere except for on Change.org. Therefore, Snopes could not independently confirm that the requests in Kaushal's petition were genuine — in this case, meaning made by a real person in good faith.

Snopes reached out to Kaushal through Change.org to verify that they were a real person and to ask about their motivation for starting the petition. They had not replied at the time of publication. Snopes also contacted the Indian Ministry of External Affairs and Harsimrat Kaur Badal and Sanjeev Arora, Indian politicians who posted about Singh's case, to ask if they had verified the authenticity of the petition or been in touch with Kaushal or Singh. We await replies from them all.

When asked about the petition, a spokesperson for DeSantis' office said: "No deal. In Florida, criminal actions have consequences."

Elusive founder, identical comments raise suspicions about petition

The popularity of Kaushal's petition raised further questions about what constituted an "authentic" petition or whether this appeal was "fake." Snopes asked Change.org whether it believed petitions must have real people with genuine, good faith requests behind them in order to be authentic or effective. 

Since at least 2024, Change.org has offered petition starters the option to use AI when drafting the wording of their appeals. In July 2024, Transparency Project, a family law charity based in the U.K., found that the AI tool Change.org uses fabricated survey results as part of an AI-generated petition (archived). We also asked Change.org how it verified the identity of petition starters, how it checked accuracy in petitions that use AI to draft appeals and how important it believe these steps to be. According to a 2017 guide published by Teen Vogue, reportedly citing Change.org staff, the source of a petition was a key factor in determining whether it was authentic or likely to be effective. 

Using searches in English and Punjabi, it was not possible to find any social media profiles or contact information belonging to someone called Manisha Kaushal who was based in Adelaide, Australia. Petition starters often post about their appeals online to increase reach but it appeared Kaushal had not.

Kaushal appeared to start the petition on Aug. 22 local time in Adelaide. Singh had not been sentenced, entered a plea or been found guilty of the state's charges on this date. 

At the time of this writing, new comments on the appeal appeared every few minutes. However, two of the most popular comments, listed in the "Featured Comments" section of the petition, were identical despite purportedly being written by different people.

The comments read: "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." 

The identical comments appeared to come from separate users in Sydney and Coff's Harbour, Australia. Such identical comments could indicate that the petition was targeted by bots, though they might equally be a result of users copying and pasting popular comments.

Change.org noted below the signature total that all signatories had been "verified." According to its own website, Change.org verifies a signature by asking people to confirm it via email. 

Singh's case stoked debate on English language tests for truck drivers

On Aug. 21, 2025, roughly a week after the Aug. 12, crash, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced (archived) that the U.S. would pause worker visas for commercial truck drivers, stating that the increasing number of foreign large truck drivers "is endangering American lives and undercutting the livelihoods of American truckers."

The move followed a Trump administration executive order, signed in April 2025, enforcing federal English language requirements for commercial driver's license (CDL) holders. The following month, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy signed a similar order that would put commercial drivers out of service if they failed to pass an English Language Proficiency test.

According to the Department of Transportation (DOT), Singh failed an English test issued by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) and was only able to accurately identify one out of four highway traffic signs when interviewed after the crash.

Following Rubio's announcement in August, two Punjabi politicians (archived) — Badal and Arora — wrote to the Indian Minister for External Affairs to ask him to intervene in Singh's case and Rubio's visa freeze, which could impact the work of tens of thousands of Punjabi truck drivers in the U.S.