DOT commercial driver’s license crackdown of foreign drivers : NPR

If there was a face to the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrant truck drivers, it would be Harjinder Singh. Indian-origin Singh was driving an 18-wheeler in Fort Pierce, Florida in August when he allegedly took an illegal U-turn, causing a crash that killed three people.

The Department of Homeland Security says Singh was in the US illegally despite California Governor Gavin Newsom He argues that he had a valid work permit when he applied for a commercial driver’s license. Singh has pleaded innocent to three counts of vehicular manslaughter.

It’s clear that Singh’s case has been a big story on conservative TV news, and there has been a quick response from the Trump administration.

Within a matter of weeks, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced new rules that would make it harder for immigrants — even those living in the country legally — to obtain commercial driver’s licenses.

“The process for issuing these licenses is absolutely 100% broken,” Duffy said at a press conference in September. “This poses a threat to public safety, and it is a national emergency that requires action now.”

There are a lot of foreign-born truck drivers who don’t know the rules of the road, and don’t speak English well, Duffy said.

“We have people on the roads who are not safe, who are not qualified, who should never have had a driver’s license. And lives are being lost,” Duffy said at another press conference in October.

The Transport Department wants stricter rules for commercial driver licenses following a series of fatal accidents involving foreign-born truck drivers, as they are urgently needed to make the country’s roads safer.

However, critics of the administration argue that there is no data to support this claim, despite some high-profile crashes that have attracted significant attention from conservative media. They argue that pushing for strict rules is tantamount to an immigration crackdown by any other name.

The Trump administration’s crackdown is hitting immigrant truck drivers hard – especially those who have been in the business for a while.

Pawan Singh was a senior in college when he started his own trucking company in Northern Virginia. Now Singh, who is no relation to Harjinder Singh, employs dozens of drivers who move rigs from the mid-Atlantic to Texas and Oklahoma. And he readily acknowledged that some of the problems DOT has identified are real.

“The safety action was long overdue,” Singh said in an interview at the company’s headquarters and maintenance garage.

There are drivers on the road who are not qualified, Singh says, who have gone through schools that help them get a CDL quickly, without actually giving them the skills to safely drive an 18-wheeler — though Singh says this isn’t just a problem for immigrants.

“An untrained driver is dangerous whether they are born here or born abroad,” Singh said. “Some schools that are just using rubber stamps to issue these driver licenses, there definitely needs to be action.”

But Singh is concerned that the Trump administration is focusing less on that problem. Instead, it seems more intent on targeting foreign-born drivers – specifically, Sikhs like him and Harjinder Singh, the driver in the fatal Florida crash.

Like other immigrants from the Punjab region of India, Sikhs have a large presence in the North American trucking industry. And Pawan Singh says that Sikhs are easy to identify because they wear turbans and have long beards.

“When we’re on the road, we stick out like a sore thumb, even though other drivers may be making similar mistakes. But when a minority community makes the same mistakes, it becomes a stereotype,” he said.

This is a stereotype that is not supported by data. In fact, critics of the Trump administration say, there is no evidence that foreign-born truck drivers are any more dangerous than their native-born counterparts.

“It seems like it’s an immigration raid by another name,” said Cassandra Zimmer-Wong, an immigration policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, a Washington, D.C., think-tank that supports free markets.

The Trump administration’s emergency rule will sharply limit which immigrants without permanent legal status are eligible for a CDL, leaving only workers with certain types of temporary visas eligible to work as truck drivers. Zimmer-Wong says this would effectively drive 200,000 immigrant truck drivers out of the industry.

The federal Department of Transportation is also pressuring states to revoke CDLs, which it says were issued illegally because the licenses are valid beyond the date the applicant’s federal work authorization documents expire.

California has already said it will revoke 17,000 CDLs that do not comply with state law because “the CDL expiration date must be at or before the expiration of the legal presence documents provided to the DMV,” a spokesperson for the California State Transportation Agency said in a statement to NPR.

The DOT is also threatening to withhold $75 million in federal funds from Pennsylvania unless the commonwealth revokes CDLs, which the Trump administration says were issued illegally.

But Zimmer-Wong says there’s no clear benefit to public safety from all this. He noted that even DOT’s audit of safety data found no evidence of a connection between a truck driver’s country of origin and their driving record.

“When I looked at the new rule and the way it was written … it seems pretty clear that the intent was to put immigrant drivers out of work, and it wasn’t necessarily about safety,” Zimmer-Wong said in an interview.

A panel of judges on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals had its own concerns about the emergency rule, causing it to be temporarily halted while the court considered a legal challenge. But the Trump administration is still insisting on making this rule permanent.