President Donald Trump brought 7-year-old Dalilah Coleman and her father, Marcus, to his Tuesday night State of the Union address, highlighting her severe injuries from a June 2024 crash that he said was caused by an undocumented immigrant truck driver licensed in California. Trump also backed proposed legislation—dubbed “the Dalilah Law”—that would tie federal transportation funding to states’ steps to restrict commercial driver’s licenses.
President Donald Trump used his State of the Union address on Tuesday night to highlight the case of Dalilah Coleman, a 7-year-old California girl who was seriously injured in a 2024 multi-vehicle crash involving a semitruck.
Dalilah attended the speech with her father, Marcus Coleman, whom Trump also recognized from the House chamber. Trump said the crash happened in June 2024 when Dalilah was 5 years old and that an 18-wheel tractor-trailer struck the family’s stopped vehicle at “60 miles an hour or more.” Trump said the driver was an undocumented immigrant from India named Partap Singh and alleged that California issued him a commercial driver’s license.
According to The Daily Wire’s account, Dalilah suffered a traumatic brain injury and has since been diagnosed with cerebral palsy and developmental delay. The report said she cannot eat orally and is learning to walk again.
Marcus Coleman told The Daily Wire that he has been frustrated that California Gov. Gavin Newsom has not contacted the family directly. “How do you not see Dalilah? How do you allow politics to blind you from a five-year-old girl at the time whose life is forever changed, and your only answer is it’s the federal government,” he said.
A Newsom spokesperson, Diana Crofts-Pelayo, told The Daily Wire that “what happened to Dalilah is heartbreaking” and said the governor’s constituent affairs team had “no record of outreach from the Coleman family,” adding that the office would “welcome the opportunity” to connect them to state resources. The Daily Wire reported that Newsom’s office did not answer a follow-up question about the driver’s licensing.
In his remarks, Trump praised Dalilah’s progress, saying doctors had predicted she would not walk, talk or eat again, but that she is now in first grade and “learning to walk.”
Trump also pointed to a broader federal dispute with California over thousands of so-called “non-domiciled” commercial driver’s licenses. Federal transportation officials have threatened to withhold—or have withheld—roughly $160 million from the state after California delayed canceling about 17,000 non-domiciled CDLs past a January 5, 2026 deadline set in a compliance fight with the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Trump said he supported legislation he called “the Dalilah Law,” aimed at barring states from granting commercial driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants. Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) announced on Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2026, that he had introduced legislation using that name, framing it as a condition on states’ receipt of federal transportation funding.
In his State of the Union remarks, Trump also argued that language barriers among undocumented immigrants pose road-safety risks, saying that “many, if not most” do not speak English and cannot read basic road signs.
