Some serious road rage is brewing between the state of California and federal Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy over the legality of non-citizen commercial truck drivers in the state.
As a result, California is set to revoke 17,000 commercial driver’s licenses, pulling thousands of truck drivers from the roads due to a violation of state law (1).
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The debate stems from fatal accidents this year in Florida, Texas and Alabama that involved non-citizens driving commercial trucks, as well as one in California. With renewed attention on non-citizen drivers, California made the announcement to revoke thousands of commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs) after discovering that the legal status of the holders to remain in the country would expire before their licenses.
Duffy took this as an opportunity to declare “Gavin Newsom and California have been caught red-handed” after “claiming they did nothing wrong,” adding that “17,000 illegally issued trucking licenses are being revoked.”
The governor’s office countered, noting that the 17,000 drivers are in the U.S. legally, that the CDLs were issued based on federal guidelines, and that Duffy is “spreading easily disproven falsehoods in a sad and desperate attempt to please his dear leader (2).”
In September, Duffy announced stricter requirements for future “non-domiciled drivers” looking to get a CDL — including “an employment-based visa and undergoing a mandatory federal immigration status check,” along with previously-announced English language proficiency requirements (3). However, one 2025 study found that only 10,000 of the current 200,000 non-citizen CDL drivers in the U.S. would meet all of those requirements (4).
Why the trucking industry is struggling to find new drivers
While there are no national statistics showing the discrepancy between fatal truck accidents caused by non-citizens versus American citizens, a comparable study of drivers in Ontario, “Canada’s largest and most ethnically diverse province,” found that “recent immigrants are less likely to be drivers involved in a serious motor vehicle crash compared to long-term residents (5).”
That said, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that commercial trucking in general has one of the highest fatal work injury rates of any profession in the country, with roughly 27 fatalities for every 100,000 full-time drivers (6). And a report from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) showed that large trucks accounted for 503,000 police-reported crashes in 2022. Of those, 1%, or almost 5,300, involved a fatality (7).
In a separate report, the FMCSA calculated the cost of large truck crashes, taking into account “lost productivity; medical costs; legal and court costs; emergency service costs; insurance administration costs; congestion costs; property damage; and workplace losses.” The FMCSA found that the average cost per non-injury crash is $46,765. That rose to $383,168 with an injury, and a staggering $14,578,771 per fatal crash (8).
The dangers of the road are one of the reasons that the publication Smart Trucking believes the industry is struggling to recruit or retain new drivers. They argue that “low pay and less than desirable working conditions” — the latter of which it describes as anything from too much unpaid work to driving in bad weather or unsafe areas — are leading potential or current drivers to look for work elsewhere (9).
A 2025 survey of more than 500 U.S. logistics professionals by the business news site Tech.co found that 63% said “their ability to recruit and retain drivers has either stagnated or worsened over the past year,” while 69% reported that driver shortages negatively affect their ability to “meet freight demand (10).” Jack Turner, a Tech.co editor, called the driver shortage “a ticking time bomb for the sector (11).”
“Not a lot of people that have the citizenship or residency want to do this,” Rosie Trujillo, the office manager at the Los Angeles Trucking College, told NBC Los Angeles. Instead, she added, it’s often “people that come from other countries … that really want that change in their lives. And they were the ones coming to get their CDL licence.”
It’s why the National Immigration Forum says that “foreign-born drivers have been instrumental in addressing these labor gaps” and “play an outsized role in stabilizing supply chains (12).” In fact, one study estimates that “immigrants constitute approximately 19% of all long-haul truck drivers in the U.S.,” a statistic in line with various official government findings.
The figure also illustrates why losing a large number of non-citizen truck drivers could have a devastating impact on supply chains and product costs across the United States.
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How to solve the trucking crisis
“Truckers are the backbone of America’s daily life,” the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants declared following news of the new non-citizen truck driver regulations. The committee added that the “decision to sideline a major portion of America’s trucking workforce threatens not only the livelihoods of immigrant drivers but the stability and well-being of the entire country” due to supply chain collapses, empty grocery store shelves and families unable to buy the essentials they need (13).
A closer look at the truck driver shortage by Newsweek showed that such supply chain disruptions and inventory shortages would also cause businesses to “compete for this lean workforce.” Newsweek also noted that the competition would mean that “freight costs rise — costs that will ultimately be passed to consumers.”
According to the American Trucking Associations (ATA), U.S. trucks “moved 11.27 billion tons of freight in 2024” and “saw revenues at $906 billion” — both metrics that are down year-over-year from 2023 (14). By potentially removing tens of thousands of non-citizen drivers from the road, the deficit of drivers could look even worse than the ATA’s previous projection of a shortage of 160,000 drivers by 2030 (15).
Smart Trucking believes that increased pay, as well as efforts to make the job more rewarding and recognizing it as an official skilled trade, would help attract more drivers to the profession.
The National Immigration Forum, meanwhile, says that a solution to the truck driver shortage isn’t stricter regulations but, rather, taking steps like reestablishing “the issuance of visas for truck drivers who comply with all the legal requirements” and using federal funds to expand English language learning and CDL training programs for foreign-born drivers.
“Resolving the truck driver shortage,” the forum emphasizes, “requires a multifaceted approach that acknowledges the essential role of foreign-born drivers.”
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Article sources
We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our editorial ethics and guidelines.
NPR (1); NBC Los Angeles (2); U.S. Department of Transportation (3); SSRN (4); Science Direct (5); U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (6); Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (7, 8); Smart Trucking (9); Tech.co (10); Newsweek (11); National Immigration Forum (12); U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (13); American Trucking Association (14, 15)
This article provides information only and should not be construed as advice. It is provided without warranty of any kind.