New York —
In his two decades as a truck driver, Luis Sanchez has lugged everything from restaurant food to gravel across the country.
It’s an isolating job with long hours; he passes the time listening to the radio. At truck stops and warehouses, he meets other drivers, many of them immigrants like himself.
“We don’t go home every day like normal work,” said Sanchez, whose home is near Fort Worth, Texas and is originally from El Salvador. “Sometimes we had to sacrifice family for the job we had.”
Sanchez ticked off all the boxes since he applied for his commercial driver’s license two decades ago: a valid work permit, Social Security number and he proudly claims he has had a perfect safety record. But now, his livelihood is gone.
He is one of thousands of noncitizen truck drivers – which include Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients, asylees, asylum seekers and refugees – who have lost or been unable to renew their commercial driving licenses in the last year as part of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Those licenses are required to drive tractor-trailers and semis.
The crackdown started while the administration cited back-to-back high-profile fatal accidents that involved truck drivers who authorities said were not permanent legal residents. Among the new regulations the Trump administration passed was a February rule that restricts issuing and renewing non-domiciled CDLs to holders of just a handful of visas. The administration also ordered some states to downgrade CDL licenses with expiration dates that outlasted drivers’ work permits, along with other issues.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) said the rule was designed to address “unqualified foreign drivers” who “pose a significant safety threat,” citing the series of fatal car accidents.
But Sanchez, who renewed his CDL two years ago, still lost his. He’s not alone: The US Department of Transportation estimates its new visa regulations could take up to nearly 200,000 licenses, or about 5% of active CDL holders, off the road.
The United States is a country dependent on its highway transport – truckers moved almost 73% of the nation’s freight in 2024, and it’s an industry already dogged by high turnover and worker shortages.
The new rules also threaten the livelihoods of a large part of America’s foreign-born trucking population. Nearly one in six CDL holders is foreign born. Communities like Punjabi Sikhs have shaped the industry.
In August 2025, the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested a Sikh truck driver who allegedly attempted to make an illegal U-turn on the Florida Turnpike and killed three people; Florida Troopers said he illegally entered the United States in 2018. Just over two months later, another driver, whom the DOT called an asylum seeker, allegedly caused a pile-up that killed three in California.
“Licenses to operate a massive, 80,000-pound truck are being issued to dangerous foreign drivers – often times illegally. This is a direct threat to the safety of every family on the road, and I won’t stand for it,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a September statement following the Florida crash.
After the accidents, Duffy took comprehensive steps to address highway and road safety involving the trucking industry. Some of those actions have been praised by the industry and safety advocates. For example, the DOT has addressed “chameleon carriers,” commercial trucking fleets that use multiple registration numbers to evade regulations and safety requirements. The agency has also shut down hundreds of fake “CDL mills.”
But some critics argue other DOT actions have been overly broad and unfairly punish drivers who were caught up in administrative errors through not fault of their own. DOT audits across several states, from California to Texas to North Carolina, found thousands of licenses whose expiration dates did not line up the holders’ worker permit expiration date, among other issues. The agency ordered those states to revoke or not renew those CDLs.
Some states, including New York, did not revoke licenses and are suing for the millions in federal highway funding dollars it lost. Texas, where Sanchez lives, did.
In December 2025, Sanchez says he saw a TikTok video from another non-domiciled CDL driver who said they found out their license was downgraded after a routine pullover on the road by a DOT officer. Concerned, Sanchez checked his own – and realized he, too, had lost his CDL.
The Texas Department of Safety reportedly notified affected drivers in the state, but Sanchez said he never received a letter. CNN has reached out to Texas DPS for comment.
The FMCSA rule only allows people who hold temporary H-2A and H-2B visas, as well as E-2, to renew and apply for non-domiciled CDLs. That leaves out most non-citizens with work permits.
The federal government says the rule and enforcement are needed for highway and road safety. In a separate order last May, the DOT said it has begun enforcing longstanding requirements, such as English language proficiency. The agency earlier rescinded a 2016 policy that relaxed consequences for failing the English requirement.
In December 2025, Duffy said the DOT pulled 9,500 drivers off the road for allegedly failing the English proficiency requirement when stopped by law enforcement.
But shutting out all non-domiciled truckers from driving would be “like taking a sledgehammer when you need a scalpel,” Stephen Burks, a former truck driver and trucking industry economist at the University of Minnesota Morris, told CNN.
If highways and interstates are the veins of the fragile domestic supply chain network, long-haul truck drivers rumbling coast-to-coast in massive 18-wheelers are the blood that runs through it.
But immigrant workers are caught in political crossfire and say it is collective punishment. The DOT cited 17 examples of fatal crashes, with some of the most notable ones involving Indian-born drivers. (The agency’s data shows a total of 3,986 fatal crashes involving large trucks and buses in 2025).
Indiana GOP Sen. Jim Banks introduced a bill in February named after Dalilah Coleman, a first grader who was severely injured in a semitruck crash caused by an Indian driver in 2024. The law aims to restrict CDLs to citizens, lawful permanent residents, and certain visa holders, and revoke CDLs from people with temporary status nationwide. President Donald Trump urged passage of the law when he invited Coleman and her father to the State of the Union Address this year. (The bill has not yet seen a vote.)
The rule has devasted Punjabi Sikhs in the US, a religious minority from North India. About one-fifth of the Sikh population in the US is involved in the trucking industry, according to the North American Punjabi Trucking Association.
The vast majority of trucking companies in the US are small businesses, many of them dependent on immigrant labor. One Punjabi man in California who spoke to CNN worked as a driver and is now a dispatcher, a job that now lets him stay at home with his family.
During the last quarter of 2025, he said his company lost a third of its 31 truckers due to downgraded CDLs. Business slowed down, and the effects trickled down to the rest of the company, which has laid off other staff.
A few months ago, 50% of the company’s truck drivers were Punjabi. Now they’re only 30%, the man said.
“Accidents can be caused by anyone, and it has (been) caused by many other nationalities,” the dispatcher, who wanted to remain unnamed because of fear of harassment, said. “But we were brought out to be the one that’s like, ‘Hey, these immigrants don’t know how to drive.’”
Many of the drivers who lost their CDLs had stayed in trucking for a stable career to support their families, the dispatcher said. Now they are driving for Uber or DoorDash, which pay a fraction of a trucker’s salary. They’ve also relied on community groups, such as United Sikhs, to connect them with resources.
The trucking community supports safety compliance efforts and English-language requirements, Raman Dhillon, CEO of the North American Punjabi Trucking Association, told CNN.
The problems with trucking safety are systemic, such as the fake trucking schools, Dhillon said.
But longtime drivers who lost their CDLs followed the rules and “did not get their licenses from a convenience store,” Dhillon said. “They got it from the DMV… and they got the work permit from the federal government. (How is it) their fault at this point?”
Several states started downgrading CDLs after the FMCSA warned that they were violating regulations in 2025. In California, where $160 million in federal highway funds were at stake, both the state and activist groups filed lawsuits.
The saga began in September 2025, when the FMCSA found that more than a quarter of California’s non-domiciled CDLs were improperly issued. The agency found that many of those non-compliant CDLs expired later than drivers’ lawful presence documents, an administrative error.
While California sued the DOT, the Sikh Coalition and Asian Law Caucus filed a class-action lawsuit against the state, claiming the CDL cancellations were unlawful. While the California court ordered the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles to allow truckers to re-apply for their CDLs, the federal government is barring the DMV from processing those applications.
California is in a bind. If it follows the court order, the Trump administration could decertify the state’s entire CDL program; that would affect all truck drivers — not just certain immigrants.
a timeline of california’s cdl saga
- August 2025: Truck driver Harjinder Singh allegedly attempted to make an illegal U-turn on the Florida Turnpike and caused a crash that killed three people. Authorities arrested him on vehicular homicide charges and alleged he had entered the country illegally. Singh pleaded not guilty.
- September 26, 2025: A US Department of Transportation audit found that more than 25% of non-domiciled CDLs reviewed were improperly issued in California. FMCSA, a DOT agency, threatened to withhold at least $160 million in highway funds if California did not comply with its emergency action. The emergency action aimed to “drastically restrict” who is eligible for non-domiciled CDLs. It demanded states pause issuing these licenses, and an audit said to revoke and reissue some CDLs.
- November 2025: The DOT says notices were sent to 17,000 non-domiciled CDL holders in California, informing them that their licenses didn’t meet federal requirements and would expire in 60 days.
- December 23, 2025: Sikh Coalition and Asian Law Caucus filed a class-action lawsuit against California, alleging the cancellations of the non-domiciled CDLs were unlawful.
- December 30, 2025: California extended its deadline for revoking licenses to March 6.
- March 2, 2026: In response to the class-action lawsuit, the Alameda County Superior Court in California ordered the state DMV to allow 20,000 immigrant truckers to re-apply for CDLs.
- March 6, 2026: The Trump administration ordered California to cancel 13,000 non-domiciled CDLs, the state DMV said. Although the state court allowed impacted drivers to re-apply for CDLs, the DMV can’t process them due to the FMCSA rule.
Sanchez, who spoke to CNN in fluent English, said it’s been five months since he found out his CDL got downgraded. He’s been applying for different jobs with no luck, as his work experience was in trucking.
“They’re not just taking away my driver license. That was my career,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been doing most of my life.”
As he tries to find a job, the bills are racking up. He supports his family in El Salvador, including his mother. He’s down thousands of dollars from the modest trucking business he tried to start two years ago, which has since shuttered.
“I’m paying my bills with a credit card right now,” Sanchez said. “I don’t have any more money right now.”
