America Has a Foreign Truck Driver Problem That's Gone Ignored for Years
President Donald Trump is making trucking great again by undoing the damage Democrat administrations did to the industry, which cost Americans jobs and made highways less safe.
For too long, trucking companies have replaced skilled American semi-truck drivers with foreigners who often lack the required English skills and training, putting American livelihoods and lives at risk. President Trump's Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, is working to fix that glaring problem.
On June 28, Sec. Duffy launched a nationwide audit targeting states issuing non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs). These are CDLs issued to temporary legal residents.
This initiative will focus on states like Illinois, Texas, and California, where an alarming surge in CDLs issued to non-citizens has undercut American truckers and raised serious safety concerns. Duffy’s crackdown is a critical step toward restoring fairness in the trucking industry and protecting lives on America’s highways.
"I want American truckers on American roads," Duffy said in a recent podcast interview. "If you listen to President Trump, it's America First. I want to put our American truck drivers first, and that means we look at what's happening with the non-domiciled CDLs."
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The Alarming Surge in Foreign Labor
The trucking industry has long been a source of stable, well-paying jobs for hardworking Americans that don't require a college degree. But recent data shows some states have quickly replaced American truck drivers with foreign labor, often at the expense of safety standards.
The trucking website Overdrive Online asked 13 states how many non-domiciled CDLs they'd issued since 2015. Among the 27,000 issued by Illinois, Texas, Oregon, Washington, South Carolina and Maine, Overdrive found that Illinois and Texas had issued half in the last two years. California doesn't even track how many it issues.
Illinois showed the fastest level of replacement. In 2022, it issued nearly 30,000 new CDLs and 616 non-domiciled CDLs. In the first six months of 2025, it's issued 5,000 non-domiciled CDLs—40 percent of its total CDL output—on pace to nearly double last year's non-domiciled output.
Texas has issued the largest number of documented non-domicile CDLs since 2015 at 52,000.
In Washington, they grew from four percent of all first-time CDLs issued before 2020 to 16 percent in 2024.
In Oregon, it jumped from 11 in 2020 to 1,032 in 2024.
Safety Risks on America’s Roads
Beyond the economic toll, the influx of inadequately vetted foreign drivers poses a threat to public safety. Federal regulations require commercial drivers to demonstrate proficiency in English to ensure they can read road signs and communicate with law enforcement. However, Barack Obama's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration removed the requirement that drivers who cannot show proficiency in English be placed out of service.
The lax enforcement implemented since Obama allowed trucking companies to skirt rules governing immigrant drivers, often leading to tragic consequences.
Since Obama made the change, fatal crashes involving large trucks rose from around 4,500, in 2016, to 8,837 in 2022, with many correctly blaming non-English-speaking drivers.
These tragedies demonstrate the dangers of prioritizing cheap labor costs over public safety.
On April 28, Trump signed an executive order reaffirming English proficiency as non-negotiable. In May, Duffy ordered that beginning on June 25, all drivers who fail an English proficiency test will be put out of service immediately.
Duffy emphasized that he will have to work with other agencies to crack down on potential fraud but that process cannot begin until he has the data on possible fraud. He said former President Joe Biden's administration didn't bother to keep track of the data, preferring to let in as many foreign workers as possible.
The trucking industry employs millions and keeps America moving, but a system that replaces American workers with often-underqualified foreign labor only works for company owners and investors, not the workers who put in the hours on the highways. Duffy’s audit is a critical step toward rooting out many lax practices that companies have gotten away with since the Obama administration. This will open more jobs to Americans and ensure only qualified drivers operate on U.S. roads.
As Duffy emphasized, this audit simply fulfills the mandate Trump received from the American people to put America first. Hopefully, this audit will restore fairness, accountability, and trust in the hiring practices of American trucking companies.
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