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Texas Cancels 6,400 CDLs for Immigrant Drivers
Trump Administration Crackdown Continues, With Federal Highway Funds at Stake
Texas has quietly canceled more than 6,400 commercial driver licenses for asylum recipients, refugees and DACA recipients in the state since November as it seeks to carry out the Trump administration's crackdown on immigrant workers.
The cancellations amount to about two-thirds of the number of commercial drivers with discretionary immigration status in Texas. Those impacted aren't permanent residents but have permits to work in the U.S. legally. Many say they had no warning about the change and are now stuck with outstanding truck loans and insurance payments that they can't afford.
"I was shocked," said Essa Khan Nikmohammad, 36, a former combat interpreter for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan who was granted asylum in 2023. His license was revoked in December. "I came legal. I didn't cross the border (illegally)."
Federal officials say the move is meant to improve public safety, pointing to a small number of crashes involving truck drivers with temporary status, including a 17-car pileup on Interstate 35 in Austin last spring that left five people dead. The driver in that case had limited English proficiency.
The Department of Transportation launched a nationwide audit after the incident, finding that several states had issued CDLs with expiration dates that didn't match those on drivers' separate work authorization forms. It threatened to withhold federal highway funds from any state that didn't work to scrub licenses with discrepancies.
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Duffy
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy also pushed through an emergency rule barring asylum recipients, refugees and DACA recipients from renewing or obtaining the permits required to drive longhaul trucks. It cited "several recent fatal crashes" as justification and said the restriction would help ensure that only drivers with a "legitimate, employment-based reason" to hold a CDL, like a work visa, are allowed to operate large trucks.
A federal court temporarily blocked the rule, but Texas officials have continued to enforce it, saying they are obligated to comply with other federal directives. That means immigrants who find themselves without licenses after the audit cannot reapply for credentials.
Duffy's agency has acknowledged that there's no conclusive evidence linking a driver's nationality to roadway safety. More than 5,000 large trucks are involved in fatal crashes each year, according to the DOT's statistics, dwarfing the number of reports of crashes involving noncitizens. Federal data shows immigrant drivers hold roughly 5% of CDLs yet account for just 0.2% of fatal crashes, according to the Associated Press.
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There are more than 718,000 active CDLs in Texas, the vast majority of which belong to citizens, according to statistics that the Department of Public Safety provided to Hearst on Jan. 6.
John Esparza, president of the Texas Trucking Association, was enthusiastic about the audit, saying it would improve overall safety on the roads. He also said the group "support(s) what the administration and our governor are doing."
"There are good drivers from other countries that can show up here — there's no question about that," Esparza told Hearst Newspapers in an interview. "But we've got to make sure that the abuse that we're seeing here ... we're not trying to be an area of abuse for immigration. We're trying to clean up our driving pool."
