The Trump administration is shutting down 110 commercial trucking schools associated with more than 5,000 drivers who failed English-language proficiency tests, some of them illegal immigrants, in a federal crackdown on fraud in the trucking industry.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration said Monday that it traced drivers cited for failing federal English-language requirements during roadside inspections back to the schools that certified their training. Each school was linked to at least 10 drivers who couldn’t meet the English proficiency requirements.
“You have to speak English to operate a commercial motor vehicle. I didn’t create that rule, President Trump didn’t create that rule; that rule has been in place for decades. We have schools that know the rule and still pass people through their school who can’t speak the language,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said during Monday’s news conference.
“As of today, those schools are shut down,” he added.
Duffy blamed the Biden administration for letting millions of illegal immigrants cross the border, while pointing to the Obama administration’s CDL rule changes as the cause of tragic accidents involving illegal immigrant truckers. At the event, Duffy was joined by one of the victims, 7-year-old Dalilah Coleman, who nearly lost her life in 2024 after she was involved in a collision caused by an illegal immigrant trucker released into the country during the Biden administration.
Dalilah was left with a traumatic brain injury, cerebral palsy, and developmental delay.
“A number of American families whose lives have been ruined, they’ve lost a loved one or a loved one has been injured by a commercial driver who should’ve never had a commercial driver’s license who didn’t protect safety on American roadways, but they actually harmed American citizens,” Duffy said.
As part of the latest crackdown, federal authorities are also closing down 160 additional CDL schools that “certified that they are qualified to train truck drivers,” but failed to provide “adequate space” for drivers to take driving tests, had unlicensed instructors, and often lacked classrooms, Duffy said.
In one case, a driving school claimed that a school bus in its backyard was its classroom, Duffy said.
“Our investigators went into 400 driver training schools, and we found that 40% of these that we investigated did not meet the rules and the requirements of our regulations,” Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration Administrator Derek Barrs said.
“When schools certify underqualified drivers, these drivers get behind the wheel of an 80,000-pound truck, and they kill people. That should make you all upset,” Barrs said.
Federal authorities have also launched an audit of states and the third-party testers they allow to certify truck drivers.
“Many of these certified state testers actually aren’t adequately testing the potential drivers that they’re gonna license,” Duffy said. “In one state, there’s ten skills testers … who have given over 2,000 driver’s licenses to people who can’t speak English.”
The Department of Transportation has placed more than 28,000 drivers out of service for English-proficiency violations in the last year and a half. During that time, the department has also forced states to cancel more than 30,000 licenses for foreign drivers.
Authorities have caught many of the non-English-speaking drivers passing through the Midwest carrying CDLs largely issued in California, New York, and Illinois.
“We are cracking down on this fraud, and we are going to bring safety back to American roadways. We’re not done; we’ve just begun,” Duffy said.
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