California announced Tuesday it would delay until March the revocation of roughly 17,000 commercial driver’s licenses, giving eligible truckers and bus drivers more time to preserve their permits — one week after immigrant commercial drivers filed a class-action lawsuit challenging the revocation plan.
The announcement put California on a collision course with the federal government: U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned the state could forfeit $160 million in federal transportation funds if it did not meet a January 5 deadline to pull the licenses, and had already withheld $40 million from California over what he described as failures to enforce English-proficiency requirements for commercial drivers.
Duffy said on social platform X that California had no extension to continue violating the law and putting Americans at risk on the roads, according to the Associated Press.
Federal pressure and state response
The U.S. Department of Transportation has pressed California to ensure that immigrants without legal authorization do not hold commercial driver’s licenses. A government audit found that some licenses remained valid long after a foreign driver’s work authorization had expired, and that the state in other cases could not document that it had verified a driver’s immigration status, the AP reported.
California had planned to resume issuing commercial driver’s licenses in mid-December, but the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration blocked that resumption. State officials said they were working to satisfy the federal agency with reforms already put in place.
Steve Gordon, director of the California Department of Motor Vehicles, said commercial drivers are essential to the state’s economy, and that supply chains and community connections depend on them, according to the AP.
Lawsuit and advocacy
The Sikh Coalition, a national civil rights organization, and the Asian Law Caucus, based in San Francisco, filed the class-action lawsuit on behalf of California commercial drivers, arguing that immigrant truckers were being treated unfairly.
Mumeeth Kaur, legal director of the Sikh Coalition, said the delay was an important step toward reducing the immediate threat the affected drivers face to their livelihoods and lives, according to the AP.
The U.S. Department of Transportation had also proposed new rules that would more clearly restrict which foreign nationals could obtain a commercial driver’s license, but a court suspended those regulations, the AP reported.
Background
The federal government’s focus on commercial driver licensing intensified after an August incident in which a trucker without proper U.S. authorization made an illegal U-turn in Florida and caused a crash that killed three people, according to the AP. A separate fatal crash in California occurred in October.
The AP reported that both the Florida crash driver and the California crash driver were Sikh — information the plaintiffs’ advocates cited in the context of their lawsuit.
Immigrants represent approximately 20% of all truck drivers in the United States, according to the AP. Permits issued to non-resident immigrants account for about 5% of all commercial driver’s licenses — roughly 200,000 drivers nationwide.
Duffy had previously threatened to withhold federal funds from California, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota after audits found significant compliance problems. He withdrew the California threat after the state agreed to revoke the permits, but reinstated the pressure when the state sought additional time.
Trucking industry associations praised the federal effort to remove from the roads drivers who should not hold licenses or who cannot meet English-proficiency requirements, according to the AP.