A federal audit has exposed a startling failure inside Minnesota’s commercial licensing system, finding that roughly one third of the state’s non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses, credentials issued to non-citizens, were handed out in violation of federal law.
The findings, announced by U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy adds fresh urgency to the Trump administration’s ongoing crackdown on states that have failed to properly vet foreign truckers before putting them behind the wheel of 18-wheelers and school buses.
Duffy announced the results of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration audit in early December, giving Minnesota just 30 days to come into compliance or risk losing up to 30.4 million dollars in federal highway funding.
The audit found the state issued non-domiciled CDLs to drivers whose licenses remained valid long after their lawful presence in the country had expired, to drivers who were flatly prohibited from holding the credential in the first place, and to drivers whose lawful presence in the United States was never properly verified by the state to begin with.
“Our audit exposes yet another example of foreigners taking advantage of Minnesota services under Governor Walz’s watch,” Duffy said in a statement announcing the findings. “Minnesota failed to follow the law and illegally doled out trucking licenses to unsafe, unqualified non-citizens, endangering American families on the road. That abuse stops now under the Trump Administration.”
It is worth being precise about what the one-third figure actually measures. It refers specifically to non-domiciled CDLs, a distinct category of license issued to drivers who are not U.S. citizens or permanent residents but who hold some form of lawful status, not to the CDL system as a whole.
Non-domiciled CDL holders make up only a small share of all commercial license holders nationally, though that share has been climbing steadily in recent years. Minnesota alone issued 1,436 non-domiciled CDLs in 2024, up from just 374 in 2018, a nearly fourfold increase in a state that also saw its overall issuance of the credential climb sharply.
Federal officials say Minnesota’s failures were not isolated. FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs said the state was “openly and blatantly defying” federal rules, and the department made clear that states now face a stark choice. “Under the Trump administration, states have two choices: meet our standards or face the consequences,” Barrs said. The department ordered Minnesota to immediately pause all issuance of non-domiciled CDLs, conduct a full internal audit of its licensing systems, and identify and revoke every non-compliant license currently on the books.
Minnesota is not alone in facing this kind of federal pressure. Pennsylvania and California have both been placed under similar special orders from the Department of Transportation after their own systems were found to have improperly issued or failed to properly expire commercial licenses held by non-citizens. California Governor Gavin Newsom’s administration announced in November it would revoke 17,000 commercial driver’s licenses after an audit found the credentials carried expiration dates that extended beyond the legal presence documents the state had on file for those drivers.
The stakes behind this crackdown are not merely bureaucratic. The Department of Homeland Security has tied the enforcement push directly to a string of fatal crashes involving foreign truckers operating in the United States without proper documentation or, in some cases, without adequate English proficiency to safely navigate American highways and read road signage. Secretary Kristi Noem’s department has publicly backed legislation named the Dalilah Law, which would bar states from issuing commercial driver’s licenses to illegal aliens altogether, a proposal President Trump personally endorsed during his State of the Union address earlier this year.
The president’s announcement of the proposed law drew a standing ovation from Republicans in the chamber, while most Democrats remained seated, underscoring how sharply divided Washington remains on the underlying immigration issues even as the safety concerns driving the policy are, by most accounts, difficult to dispute. “That’s why tonight I’m calling on Congress to pass what we will call the Dalilah Law, barring any state from granting commercial driver’s licenses to illegal aliens,” Trump told the joint session.
DHS has cited a string of specific, harrowing cases to make its argument. Officials point to an illegal alien semi-truck driver, issued a CDL by the state of Pennsylvania, who authorities say swerved into oncoming traffic in February and killed four innocent people in a head-on collision.
In a separate case highlighted by the department, a Chinese national holding a CDL who failed an English proficiency test after a fatal crash was tied to the death of an American motorist, according to a joint announcement from DHS and the Department of Transportation.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has also made arrests connected to the broader crackdown, including the high-profile case of a driver named Harjinder Singh, arrested in Fresno, California, in August pursuant to a warrant tied to his CDL status. His case became something of a flashpoint in the national debate, with critics of lax state licensing standards pointing to it as exactly the kind of preventable tragedy that stricter federal enforcement is designed to stop.
Not every state has waited for a federal ultimatum to act. Indiana moved on its own earlier this year, with Governor Mike Braun signing a law in mid-March that took effect just weeks later and tightly restricted eligibility for non-domiciled CDLs to holders of only three specific work visa categories: H-2A, H-2B, and E-2. The result was swift and dramatic: the state’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles revoked nearly all of its previously issued non-domiciled commercial licenses, stripping the credential from close to 2,000 drivers almost overnight.
Supporters of Indiana’s law say it was a necessary response to a series of deadly crashes involving immigrant drivers and argue that state and federal oversight had simply failed to keep pace with a system that was too easily exploited.
The Indiana Motor Truck Association backed the measure, with the group’s president noting that professional truckers who follow the rules are among the safest drivers in the country but that a lack of oversight had allowed licenses to be issued to drivers who should never have qualified.
Predictably, the crackdown has drawn criticism from immigrant advocacy groups and some in the trucking industry who warn that stripping licenses from drivers who held valid work authorization at the time they were issued, including refugees, asylees, and DACA recipients, could push tens of thousands of legally present workers out of the trucking industry entirely.
One industry estimate cited by critics suggested the administration’s emergency rule could ultimately affect as many as 200,000 immigrant truckers nationwide, though that figure has not been independently verified by federal regulators.
Those objections, however, sidestep the central finding driving the federal crackdown, which is that states were not simply licensing legally present immigrant workers but were, in Minnesota’s case, issuing licenses to drivers who were prohibited from holding them altogether or who never had their legal status verified in the first place. That is not a story about legitimate immigrants being swept up in overreach. It is a story about basic regulatory failure at the state level, one severe enough that the federal government is now threatening to pull tens of millions of dollars in highway funding to force compliance.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has pushed back on the federal findings, telling reporters that his state has followed the law “exactly as it’s written” and accusing Washington of piling on unfairly.
That defense has done little to satisfy federal officials, who point to their own audit results as clear evidence that Minnesota’s system allowed non-citizens without proper legal status to obtain licenses authorizing them to operate massive commercial vehicles on American highways.
The Minnesota Department of Public Safety has since confirmed it is pausing all non-domiciled CDL issuance while it works through the federal demands, and the state’s Driver and Vehicle Services division says it currently has just over 2,100 non-domiciled CDL holders on its books, a relatively small number that nonetheless represents, according to the federal audit, a system riddled with basic compliance failures.
Federal officials have made clear that Minnesota’s penalty could grow significantly if the state fails to act. Beyond the initial 30.4 million dollars at risk this year, the Department of Transportation has signaled the state could lose an additional 60 million dollars in funding next year if it continues to fall short of federal standards.
That kind of financial pressure appears designed to leave states with little room to simply wait out the political fight in Washington.
