(KMJ) The U.S. Department of Transportation issued a statement Wednesday accusing California of widespread misconduct with the issuance of non-domiciled CDLs.
Sec. Sean Duffy said that the California DMV has admitted to illegally issuing thousands of commercial drivers licenses “to dangerous foreign drivers.”
California has come under intense scrutiny from Duffy for failure to enforce English Language Proficiency standards and for failure to comply with new restrictions on CDL issuance for non-citizens. After several high-profile, deadly crashes Duffy threatened to withhold $160 million in federal transportation funding to punish the state for failure to comply with federal ELP and CDL standards.
“After weeks of claiming they did nothing wrong, Gavin Newsom and California have been caught red-handed. Now that we’ve exposed their lies, 17,000 illegally issued trucking licenses are being revoked,” said Duffy. “This is just the tip of the iceberg. My team will continue to force California to prove they have removed every illegal immigrant from behind the wheel of semi trucks and school buses.”
In June, following a tragic big rig crash involving an illegal immigrant driver, Sec. Duffy posted: “The @USDOT will NOT fund rogue state actors who refuse to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement,” Duffy wrote in a post on X. “And to cities that stand by while rioters destroy transportation infrastructure — don’t expect a red cent from DOT, either. Follow the law, or forfeit the funding.”
The DOT says California must provide a full audit of all its non-domiciled CDLs so the agency can verify that every illegally issued license has been revoked and that the failures that allowed these licenses to be issued are corrected.
