In the CA trucking license dispute, one group may have the most to lose

from Gagandeep SinghCalMatters

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Once upon a time, diesel engines rumbled to life every morning at Bikramjeet Singh Gill’s truck depot in Stockton as drivers completed their pre-trip inspections before heading to destinations across the United States. Now dozens of his trucks sit idle, gathering dust and debt.

About 35 of Gill’s immigrant drivers have been notified since last fall that the Department of Motor Vehicles is canceling their commercial driver’s licenses. And they were gone.

“We’ve lost close to $2 million in the last four months while paying $200,000 a month to the bank and the insurers for 35 parked trucks. The banks don’t wait,” said Gill, who runs Gillson Trucking Inc.

His employees and his trucks are tied up in one of the hotspots of the Trump administrationa broad crackdown on all types of immigration.

The company’s troubles began in September when the Trump administration released an audit that called into question the legitimacy of about 17,000 California commercial driver’s licenses held by immigrants, finding licenses with expiration dates that exceeded the drivers’ permission to live and work in the U.S.

California followed by notifying those drivers that their licenses would be revoked. The Trump administration also released new regulations in September targeting immigrant drivers that will eventually revoke the licenses of as many as possible 61,000 truck drivers in the coming years.

This is a pressing issue for the Sikh community in California. About 35 percent of the state’s commercial drivers are estimated to be Sikhs — members of a religious minority of Indian origin — according to an industry advocacy group that represents them. They are well established in California’s Central Valley, the agricultural region stretching from Reading to Bakersfield.

Many Sikh Californians went into debt to immigrate to the United States, and truck driving became a vital source of income for them.

The Sikh Coalition, an American Sikh advocacy group, filed a lawsuit before the Asian Law Caucus in Alameda Superior Court challenging California’s decision to cancellation of non-resident commercial driver’s licenses.

The Sikh Coalition defines it as a civil rights issue targeting “specific groups of immigrant truckers.”

“When someone loses their CDL, they lose their livelihood,” said Munmeet Kaur, the Sikh Coalition’s legal director. “Here, the DMV intends to en masse revoke the livelihoods of 20,000 people without giving them any opportunity to be heard, challenge the decision, and/or provide evidence as to how the DMV can correct the error and reissue their license. This is a gross violation of due process.”

Trump administration’s focus on immigrant drivers intensified after two fatal crashes involving Sikh truck drivers attracted national attention. In August, a Sikh truck driver, Harjinder Singh, made an illegal U-turn on a highway, killing three people in Florida.

In Ontario, east of Los Angeles, another Sikh driver, Jashanpreet Singh, 21, of Yuba City, crashed into stopped vehicles on Interstate 10, killing three people on October 21.

The Trump administration is threatening to cut off state transportation funding over what the administration describes as a delay in revoking licenses.

“This is a day for Gavin Newsom and California. Our demands were simple: enforce the rules, revoke the illegally issued licenses of dangerous foreign drivers and fix the system so this never happens again,” US Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy said earlier this month.

Now thousands of drivers are struggling to make ends meet.

“Any other driver with a non-resident license is now unable to secure a job. Many companies will not hire them, and brokers and shippers will not load trucks with non-resident license holders,” said Raman Dillon, CEO of the North America Punjabi Trucking Association.

“Totally devastated”

On a recent Friday afternoon, Gill sat in his office in his green turban and jacket, answering phone calls and juggling emails. Certificates of excellence hung on the walls of his office, a testament to his hard work. He and Harsimran Singh worked 18-hour days to build the company and achieve their immigrant dream after leaving Punjab, a state in northern India.

Gil started his company with one truck in 2010. Now he and Singh own nearly 200. Like many trucking companies in California, Gilson relies on a workforce that includes immigrant drivers who have valid commercial driver’s licenses.

“It’s a chain,” he said in an office decorated with U.S. and California flags. “It’s not just the driver. You have dispatchers, brokers, farm workers who make the product, local drivers and then local drivers carrying the freight from the farms to the distribution yards. For every driver, 10 people will be affected. It’s not 17,000 — approximately 200,000 people will be affected in the Central Valley alone.”

Fears of racial profiling

About 750,000 Sikhs live in the United States, and about 150,000 work in the transportation industry, mostly as drivers. The deadly crashes late last summer and their aftermath have sent shivers down the spine of the Sikh community that have not only economic consequences, but psychological ones as well.

Travelers along State Route 99, the artery that runs through California’s Central Valley, in recent years have noticed depictions of Sikh iconography along the road and on trucks, such as depictions of warrior Baba Deep Singh and singers such as Sidhu Musewalaas well as religious symbols. Now these markers of identity have largely been removed.

“Each driver displays pictures or signs representing what inspires them,” Gill said. “Now they’ve taken them down. Drivers say people are recording videos of their trucks and posting them on social media or pushing them aggressively.”

Dhillon cited another reason related to shippers. “We’re asking people not to display these things because a lot of shippers won’t load your truck when they see these images on windows or trailers,” Dillon said.

He noted that instead of law enforcement, drivers report harassment from the general public. “Ordinary people bully people who wear turbans,” Dillon said. “But I will say that drivers should present themselves as professional drivers.”

Naindeep Singh, executive director of the Jakara Movement, a California-based Sikh advocacy organization, believes drivers crossing state lines are becoming wary about displaying conspicuous stickers, which could lead to racial profiling.

“They shared with us often, albeit informally, very scared of using their names, sharing about instances of microaggressions of racism that they were beginning to feel or experience as they were trucking around the country,” he said.

Lives in uncertainty

Immigrant drivers who have received cancellation notices and those affected by ICE enforcement operations have begun to shift to low-cost jobs with Uber, Lyft and DoorDash in the Central Valley.

Gill said these drivers own homes and support families. How will they support their households when their income suddenly drops from $8,000 a month to whatever they can earn through gig work.

“The drivers have families and most of them have settled here,” Mehta said. “A lot of them have bought houses, so 17,000 houses will be affected – everything connected to those homes, the whole economic ecosystem.”

Mehta wants the state to extend the licenses by six months, which will allow companies to adjust to the new rules. “If we can get that time, I think we should be fine,” Mehta said.

Dhillon asked the California DMV to acknowledge what he described as its mistakes — issuing expiring licenses after the authorized presence of drivers — and correct them. “They need to figure out a way to keep these drivers until their work permit expires,” Dillon said.

Mehta is a Republican who voted for Trump. So did many of his colleagues in the industry. Mehta still likes Trump.

“He should broaden his vision and understand things more deeply. He should not be subject to his whims and fancies. We want someone who understands things in detail and really cares about the economy and the industry,” Mehta added.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.