California loses $160m for delaying revocation of 17,000 commercial driver’s licences for immigrants

California will lose US$160 million for delaying the revocations of 17,000 commercial driver’s licences for immigrants, federal transportation officials announced on Wednesday.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy already withheld US$40 million in federal funding because he said California is not enforcing English proficiency requirements for truckers.

The state notified these drivers in the autumn that they would lose their licences after a federal audit found problems that included licences for truckers and bus drivers that remained valid long after an immigrant’s visa expired. Some licences were also given to citizens of Mexico and Canada who do not qualify. More than one-quarter of the small sample of California licences that investigators reviewed were unlawful.

But then last week California said it would delay those revocations until March, after immigrant groups sued the state because of concerns that some groups were being unfairly targeted. Duffy said the state was supposed to revoke those licences by Monday.

Duffy is pressuring California and other states to make sure immigrants who are in the country illegally are not granted the licences.

“Our demands were simple: follow the rules, revoke the unlawfully issued licences to dangerous foreign drivers, and fix the system so this never happens again,” Duffy said in a written statement. “Govenor Gavin Newsom has failed to do so — putting the needs of illegal immigrants over the safety of the American people.”

Newsom’s office did not immediately respond after the action was announced on Wednesday afternoon.

Enforcement ramped up after fatal crashes

The US federal government began cracking down during the summer. The issue became prominent after a truck driver, who was not authorised to be in the US, made an illegal U-turn and caused a crash in Florida that killed three people in August.

Duffy previously threatened to withhold millions of dollars in federal funding from California, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, New York, Texas, South Dakota, Colorado, and Washington after audits found significant problems under the existing rules, including commercial licences being valid long after an immigrant truck driver’s work permit expired. He had dropped the threat to withhold nearly US$160 million from California after the state said it would revoke the licences.

Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration Administrator Derek Barrs said California failed to live up to the promise it made in November to revoke all the flawed licences by January 5. The agency said the state also unilaterally decided to delay until March the cancellations of roughly 4,700 additional unlawful licences that were discovered after the initial ones were found.

“We will not accept a corrective plan that knowingly leaves thousands of drivers holding non-compliant licences behind the wheel of 80,000-pound trucks, in open defiance of federal safety regulations,” Barrs said.

Industry praises the enforcement

Trucking trade groups have praised the effort to get unqualified drivers who should not have licences or cannot speak English off the road. They also applauded the Transportation Department’s moves to go after questionable commercial driver’s licence schools.

“For too long, loopholes in this programme have allowed unqualified drivers onto our highways, putting professional truckers and the motoring public at risk,” said Todd Spencer, president of the Owner Operator Independent Drivers Association.

The spotlight has been on Sikh truckers, because the driver in the Florida crash and the driver in another fatal crash in California in October are both Sikhs. So 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. They said immigrant truck drivers were being unfairly targeted.

Immigrants account for about 20 per cent of all truck drivers, but these non-domiciled licences immigrants can receive only represent about 5 per cent of all commercial driver’s licences, or about 200,000 drivers. The Transportation Department also proposed new restrictions that would severely limit which non-citizens could get a licence, but a court put the new rules on hold.

AP