We have seen an abundance of reporting – little of it favorable – on the Trump Administration’s crackdown on illegal aliens.
It’s impossible to know exactly how many illegal aliens there are in the United States at any one time; the low estimate is in the range of thirty to forty million, but it’s likely higher. The Secretary of Homeland Security gets most of the press for this effort, and she’s doing yeoman’s work.
We know why it’s a critical project: these massive numbers of illegals suck up huge amounts of local, state and federal welfare funding; they overwhelm our criminal justice, education, and healthcare systems, they drive wages down and unemployment up, and they cause the unavailability and unaffordability of housing. With every raid and deportation, DHS helps lighten the burden on the legal American economy.
But there are other, more complex aspects of the crackdown that are just as important, but not as obviously, and in different ways.
Such as the illegal CDL crackdown.
The Commercial Driver’s License is generally issued by states – following training programs such as truck driving schools or large trucking companies themselves – but this doesn’t make it a state issue, independent of the federal government, as much as many politicians and activists would like it to be.
There is a federal role in ensuring the safety of our nation’s roads, most obviously because of the Constitutional dictate on “regulating interstate commerce,” and the federal funding of many highways.
The U.S. Department of Transportation has therefore established sets of regulations governing the commercial use of America’s roadways, such as stipulating that for a state to issue CDLs, there must be a standardized testing process on the types of vehicles the applicant will be driving; the state must research the applicant’s driving record, confirm proficiency in both spoken and written English, etc. If third parties are approved to perform these processes, they must be just as rigorous as the state.
But what have we learned in recent years? That a number of states have been issuing CDLs in violation of these federal standards, especially the version known as “non-domiciled CDLs,” the commercial driver’s license issued to legal nonresidents and non-citizens. Six in particular – California, Colorado, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas and Washington – have been identified as so far out of compliance that they have ceased issuing non-domiciled CDLs altogether, at least temporarily.
This has some in the press getting upset. They hear the administration talk about cracking down on violent felons and welfare scammers, and they say, “but these are hard-working truck drivers, aren’t they the sort of immigrants we claim to want?”
Well, no. It’s more than that. Being willing to work hard is good, certainly, but that’s not the whole enchilada.
Before we find a truck driver desirable – and worthy of a CDL – we need to establish such issues as ability, care, lawfulness, dependability.
A generation ago, if you asked any American who the best, safest drivers on the road are, the answer would have been “truck drivers.” The average American has immense respect for someone who can handle a 53’ semi, who can back into a tricky loading dock, who can keep straight all the different regulations of the lower 48 states, understand the HazMat regulations, and manage cumbersome and dangerous tasks like tarping a flatbed load or driving 80,000 lbs up and down steep mountains or scary bridges.
But in recent decades, we’ve found that more and more truck drivers actually can’t do those things, because they arrived illegally from other countries, don’t speak English, were poorly trained, don’t care about the safety of others, or some mixture of the above. And these bad ones reflect badly on the good truck drivers.
This doesn’t mean that our good truck drivers are getting worse; it means that their numbers have been diluted by the addition of drivers who don’t belong on the roads.
And yes, we’re finding that the reason for this is that so many states are giving out CDLs like the toys in a Cracker Jack box, without proper testing, vetting, expectations or societal concerns.
What Secretary Sean Duffy and his team are discovering is that there are states with trucking schools operating as diploma mills, happily churning out drivers who shouldn’t be trusted with a Mattel’s Hot Wheels set, let alone a truck full of other people’s cargo and a license to drive at 70 mph on the public roadways.
They have discovered a pattern of states looking the other way as dozens or even hundreds of drivers are registered as living at the same address, or dozens of truck companies claiming to share the same office, usually complex networks of foreign shell companies, clearly designed to be as confusing as possible so that moving violations, lawsuits, and other fines can’t easily be tracked back in a way that would result in licenses being pulled.
Such situations compound the problems. Think of the insurance fraud, for example, the tax dodges, the doctoring of log books, the likely billing improprieties and the opoprtunities for cargo theft.
Hundreds of thousands of truck drivers are likely in the process of being decertified as a result of these discoveries. Some of these may actually be decent drivers, but the numbers don’t lie: the majority of these cases are the problem truckers, the ones hauling HazMat improperly, or failing to maintain the brake lights on their rigs, or disobeying signage, or causing vehicle accidents.
The federal CDL standards don’t pose an unfair burden.
You DO need to be fluent in English to read road signage, to follow a GPS or manual instructions, and to communicate with dispatchers, shippers and recipients. You DO need to be well-trained to operate these many different kinds of equipment, from box trucks to semis, from flatbeds to tankers. You DO need to be a law-abiding citizen (or properly legal visa-holder) to be trusted with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of other people’s cargo, in order for the customers’ and your insurance company’s interests to be protected.
We see complaints in the press about these states being forced to shut down the diploma mills. Why don’t they complain that their local and state politicians allowed such deathtraps to exist all these years, in the first place? Whose palms were greased?
We see complaints that thousands of shippers will temporarily have trouble finding drivers to handle their loads while drivers are decertified and/or deported. Why don’t they cheer that – finally – the government is taking action to make the roads safer? Don’t they really care about safer roads?
When, thirty years ago, a single illegal truck driver in Illinois was found to have obtained his CDL as a result of a bribe, resulting in a vehicle crash and the death of an innocent pastor’s family, a Republican governor (George Ryan) was brought down as a result, and he ended up in prison.
The press was right to take the issue seriously, back then. Why don’t they take it so seriously today?
We don’t hear the national press calling for Gavin Newsom and Bob Ferguson to go to jail, when their lax rules have resulted in dozens of times more, perhaps hundreds of times more, inept and dangerous truck drivers to be licensed for road jobs.
Why the double standard? If they were right to hound Governor Ryan into a federal pen, what possible excuse can they make for failing to hound these other governors into prison? Many other states’ willful neglect of both federal and state law has resulted in far more crashes and deaths than the late George Ryan ever caused.
Well, whether the press reports it or not, the U.S. Department of Transportation is finally doing the work that too many of our states have refused to do – pulling bad truck drivers off the roads, and making highway safety a priority again.
Inch by inch, issue by issue, things are getting better, thanks to the Trump Administration’s focus on doing their constitutional jobs.
Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
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