Immigrant truck drivers struggle after license suspension

from Adam EchelmanCalMatters

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Thousands of immigrant truck drivers in California are in legal limbo after the Trump administration ordered the state to revoke their licenses earlier this year. Many of them are now unemployed and unable to support their families.

Numerous lawsuits have sought to reinstate commercial driver’s licenses, also known as driver’s licenses, but so far none of the cases have succeeded in keeping these drivers on the road.

How much 61,000 California truck drivers will lose their licenses in the coming years as a result of the federal action, representing between 5% and 10% of license holders in the state. An estimated 13,000 drivers have already lost their licenses, which industry experts say could raise transportation costs across the state.

Many of the affected drivers are asylum seekers or those with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status. They have the legal right to live and work in the U.S., but the Trump administration has argued, without specific data, that these truckers drive more dangerously than U.S. citizens or immigrants with more permanent status, such as green card holders. To justify its crackdown, the federal government cited several fatal crashes last year involving Punjabi truck drivers, including one in Ontario in October that killed three the people.

For affected immigrant drivers, losing their trucking licenses puts their livelihoods at risk.

One, whose last name is Singh, has two children and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. For years, he rarely came home as a long-haul truck driver hauling cargo across the country. CalMatters agreed not to use his first name because he fears immigration officials will refer him to him.

Singh is legally able to live and work in the US because a judge approved his asylum case. He applied for a green card three years ago, but it still hasn’t arrived. If so, he would be exempt from the actions and policies of federal law enforcement.

As an independent contractor, Singh contracts with delivery companies, making between $11,000 and $16,000 a month. But the costs are high. Four years ago, he bought his own truck for $160,000 and has monthly loan payments of $3,000 plus $1,500 in monthly insurance.

As a result of the new enforcement action, Singh lost his commercial license on March 6 and can no longer drive his truck. The California DMV issued him a temporary license that allows him to drive, but that license is not suitable as a form of identification, Singh said, because many employers do not recognize its validity. The temporary license is not a hard copy and does not have a photo.

Singh said his wife has started working as a nanny while Singh looks for work.

“What job is going to pay the rent and all those payments?” he said during a phone interview with CalMatters as his children, ages 4 and 8, screamed for him in the background.

A year of waiting for a decision

In September, the Trump administration criticized the California DMV to issue commercial licenses with expiration dates that do not match the dates of drivers’ work permits. The federal government then ordered California to revoke thousands of trucking licenses for certain noncitizens and created a new policy barring such immigrant drivers from obtaining licenses in the future. Gov. Gavin Newsom said the allegations unfairly or false but the state eventually complied.

In February, an Alameda County Superior Court judge ordered the state to give drivers like Singh a chance to restore their licenses after a law firm and two legal advocacy groups, the Asian Legal Group and the Sikh Coalition, sued on behalf of truck drivers.

But California has not yet reissued any of the 13,000 licenses it revoked.

“The court ruled that the DMV must accept new applications and act on those applications within a ‘reasonable time,'” DMV spokesman Jonathan Groveman told CalMatters in an email. The DMV told Singh and other affected drivers that they could reapply for their licenses and that the DMV would take up to one year to process them. Even then, the DMV told an Alameda County Superior Court judge that it might not be able to make a decision about the licenses.

The DMV has been slow because it is under pressure from the U.S. Department of Transportation, which has threatened to punish California if it issues business licenses to these immigrants. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has already said he will withhold roughly $160 million in federal highway funds from the state because of its past handling of trucking licenses. He also said that if the state reissues the licenses, the transportation department will consider tougher action, including taking away the state’s ability to issue trucking licenses entirely.

The California DMV judge transportation department in February in response to the threats. Other court cases, incl case in Washington, DCcould repeal some of the policies affecting immigrant drivers in California, but they have not yet passed.

In March, Singh called his bank to ask about deferring payments on his truck loan while he waited for a decision to reinstate his license. He said the bank was aware of his situation as it had received a number of similar calls from other truckers this week. It denied his request, he said.

On April 2, the Alameda judge held another hearing seeking an update on the DMV’s attempts to reinstate the licenses. The state said it is still resolving its feud with the Trump administration and is awaiting the status of related legal developments, which could take months. The judge agreed to discuss the matter again in October.

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