President Donald Trump’s transportation secretary has issued new regulations to remove almost 200,000 dangerous migrant truck drivers from the nation’s highways.
“The combination of a catastrophic failure of states to follow the law and a broken system has created an imminent hazard to American travelers,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on Friday morning as he announced emergency rules to exclude dangerous foreign drivers and to penalize California’s pattern of “illegally” awarding licenses to foreign drivers.
The new rules are limited by threatened lawsuits from major trucking companies, warehouses, and retailers such as Amazon. For example, the roughly 190,000 foreign drivers will be able to operate until their licenses expire. This delay gives transport companies time to hire and train Americans, perhaps at decent wages.
The Duffy regulations are good news for American truckers who are facing wage-cutting competition from the many foreign drivers welcomed by President Joe Biden. For example, Biden’s deputies allowed many young Indian men to enter the country on B-1/B-2 tourist visas, knowing they were likely to get a Commercial Driver’s License (CDL) in Democrat-run, migrant-friendly licensing offices.
Earlier, Duffy reinstated enforcement of a regulation requiring drivers to understand English.
The new Duffy regulations are also a win for political advocates for American truckers. Those advocates have been influential because many truckers are expected to vote in the pending 2026 midterm election.
Their campaign was also helped because the public has seen how Biden’s migrant drivers are causing many dramatic wrecks on the nation’s highways. For example, three Haitians were killed when Indian migrant Harjinder Singh steered his 18-wheeler into a U-turn on a Florida turnpike.
The political success is also a promising sign for the many white-collar American professionals who are trying to reduce the damage caused by the H-1B and other white-collar outsourcing visas.
Duffy’s new rules do not deny licenses to all migrants. For example, migrants on so-called E-2 investor visas will still be able to get CDLs. Temporary migrants on H-2B and H-2A will be able to get licenses, mostly for short-haul work — unless American truckers successfully lobby for their exclusion. Legalized immigrants with green cards will also be able to get licenses.
Business-backed, pro-migration advocates denounced the pro-American policy as:
A huge problem for American businesses and local governments (inc. school districts); the Trump admin may end up denying CDL renewals to as many as 200,000 people who currently have CDLs, at a time when there is a shortage of people with CDLs nationwide.
“We have launched a nationwide audit of non-domiciled [foreign] CDLs [license holders] to get to the bottom of what we think is causing this crisis,” Duffy announced Friday:
We’ve heard from truckers and safety advocates and news reports that something was seriously wrong. It was alleged that the open-border policies of the last administration has led to an exploitation of our nation’s trucking licensing system. So today, I’m here to tell you after our audit, that those reports, they’re all true.
Breitbart News played a role in spotlighting these reports, amid near-silence from the establishment outlets, such as the New York Times and Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post.
The reports show that indebted migrants often drive two or three people in a truck to avoid sleep delays and to help load and unload the cargo. They often drive without being able to read roadway signs or safety rules, and usually face intense economic pressure to avoid delays, maintenance, or safe-driving rules. These migrants’ ability to ignore the 1960s Great Society good-government rules allow the migrants to capture much business from transport brokers, so generating dollar wealth for their families remaining in India.
Many Mexican drivers illegally carry domestic loads after they legally deliver loads from Mexico under terms set by free-trade treaties.
This inflow of cheap migrants is also pushing many American truckers and their families out of jobs, reducing high-tech investment in trucking and warehousing, and also killing a growing number of Americans.
Duffy described how business demand for cheap drivers, and the Democrats’ welcome for illegal migrants, crashed the good-government enforcement of normal licensing and safety rules:
What our audit has already discovered should anger every single American… First, our audit revealed a systemic breakdown among states to follow the law and issue licenses properly. States are failing to follow even the most basic procedures. We even uncovered widespread procedural errors, computer programming flaws, and a gross lack of oversight in the states that issue CDLs. This means that thousands of licenses that should never have been issued actually were issued.
States are issuing licenses that extend months and even years behind [the time allowed for] a [migrant] driver’s lawful presence in the U.S. This is a direct incentive to stay in our country illegally beyond their authorized work permit if they have a driver’s license. So in some disturbing cases, they have failed to validate a [migrant] driver’s lawful presence before handing them a commercial license.
It’s deeply disturbing, but even worse, our second finding was that the current federal regulations are allowing dangerous, unqualified drivers on American roadways. This means that even when the rules are being followed, dangerous individuals who shouldn’t be near a big rig are getting behind the wheel and causing crashes on our roadways. Eligibility requirements are deeply flawed and they’re way too broad. They’re simply not strong enough to prevent more of these horrific crashes from occurring in America.
“The system, it is failed, and it is a national emergency,” said Duffy:
So the combination of a catastrophic failure of states to follow the law and a broken system, has created an imminent hazard to American travelers. That is why today, I’m announcing two immediate major actions.
Number one, we’re issuing an emergency rule that fundamentally overhauls who is eligible for a non-domiciled CDL. These tighter federal standards, they’re going to keep American families safe on our roadways.
Now this is not a proposal. This is the final rule, and it is effective immediately…
Here’s the bottom line: Non-citizens will not be eligible for a CDL unless they meet a much stricter set of rules.
Second, all states must immediately pause the issuance of non-domiciled CDLs until they can comply with our new rules.
My message, it’s very simple: Get into compliance now, or we’ll pull funding and we’ll force you into compliance.
Duffy singled out California’s role in the crisis:
Nowhere in the country have we found a more egregious licensing situation than in the state of California. That’s why the second action we’re announcing today is an additional enforcement action against California.
So for two weeks, [federal] investigators were on site in California, actually looking at their records. So we took a random sample. Investigators found that more than one-in-four non-domiciled CDLs were issued in direct violation of federal safety standards. So let’s just put that another way: Over 25 percent of these licenses, they were issued illegally.
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