A week after immigrant groups filed a lawsuit, California said Tuesday it would delay revoking 17,000 commercial drivers’ licenses until March to allow more time to ensure that truck drivers and bus drivers who legally qualify for licenses can keep them.
But U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the state could lose $160 million if it doesn’t meet a Jan. 5 deadline to revoke licenses. He had already withheld $40 million in federal funding because he said California was not enforcing English proficiency requirements for truck drivers.
After Duffy pressured the state to ensure that licenses were not granted to immigrants living in the country illegally, California simply sent notices invalidating the licenses. An audit found problems such as licenses that remained valid long after an immigrant’s permission to stay in the country expired or licenses where the state could not prove that it had verified the driver’s immigration status.
“California has no ‘extension’ for breaking the law and putting Americans at risk on the streets,” Duffy posted on the social platform X.
The Transportation Department has been making the issue a priority ever since a truck driver who was not authorized to live in the US made an illegal U-turn and caused a crash in Florida that killed three people in August.
California officials said they are working to make sure the federal Transportation Department is satisfied with the reforms they have made. The state had planned to resume issuing commercial driver’s licenses in mid-December, but the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration halted it.
“Commercial drivers are a vital part of our economy – our supply chains don’t move, and our communities don’t stay connected without them,” said DMV Director Steve Gordon.
The Sikh Coalition, a national group defending the civil rights of Sikhs, and the San Francisco-based Asian Law Caucus filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the California drivers. He said immigrant truck drivers are being unfairly targeted. The driver in the Florida crash and the driver in another fatal crash in California in October are both Sikhs.
About 20% of all truck drivers are immigrants, but these non-domiciled licensed immigrants only account for 5% of all commercial driver’s licenses, or about 200,000 drivers. The Department of Transportation also proposed new restrictions that would severely limit the extent to which noncitizens can obtain licenses, but a court blocked the new rules.
Mumith Kaur, legal director of the Sikh Coalition, said the delay is “an important step towards reducing the immediate threat these drivers face to their lives and livelihoods.”
Duffy previously threatened to withhold millions of dollars in federal funding from California, Pennsylvania and Minnesota after the audit found significant problems under existing rules such as allowing commercial licenses to remain valid long after an immigrant truck driver’s work permit expires. He dropped his threat to withhold $160 million from California when the state said it would revoke the license because the state was in compliance.
Trucking trade groups have praised the effort to remove unqualified drivers from the road who shouldn’t have a license or who can’t speak English. He also appreciated the move of the transport department to take action against dubious commercial driver’s license schools.
