California Affairs | The Navarro Report
The U.S. Department of Transportation pulled 11 California commercial driver training schools from its federal registry this week, part of a nationwide emergency shutdown of more than 110 schools accused of certifying drivers who later failed English-language proficiency tests. On paper, this is a highway-safety enforcement action. In practice, federal officials made clear within hours that California is the primary target, and that the underlying concern has far more to do with immigration enforcement than with commercial driving standards.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the closures Monday in Detroit alongside Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration Administrator Derek Barrs, and members of a White House task force on fraud. Duffy said the 110 targeted schools collectively accounted for more than 5,000 drivers who were later cited at roadside inspections for failing to meet English-language requirements, with each school having certified at least ten such drivers. Another 160-plus schools face a similar review, and roughly 23 of the flagged operations were found to be online-only, with no physical facility at all.
California’s 11 closures placed it among the states hit hardest, alongside Texas and Pennsylvania at 13 schools each, and ahead of Florida’s 10. But the state-by-state count understates how squarely California sits at the center of this story. Duffy told reporters that a large share of the unlawfully issued licenses nationwide trace back to California, New York, and Illinois, and that drivers holding those licenses are frequently cited far from home, particularly in the Midwest. Homeland Security’s Mullin went further, citing a Yuma Sector enforcement action in which Customs and Border Protection arrested 95 commercial drivers in the country illegally, 76 of them holding California-issued commercial licenses.
That framing has drawn a sharp response from Sacramento. A spokesperson for Governor Gavin Newsom’s office called the announcement a political stunt lacking due process or clear safety standards, and cited federal crash data showing that drivers holding California-issued commercial licenses are involved in fatal crashes at a rate 42 percent below the national average. That statistic is difficult to reconcile with the administration’s framing of California as ground zero for a public-safety crisis, and it points to the real fault line here: this crackdown follows directly from an April 2025 executive order requiring commercial drivers nationwide to demonstrate English proficiency, a policy the Trump administration has pursued as part of a broader effort targeting immigrant truck drivers, with California singled out as what officials have called a problem state.
The trucking industry’s leading advocacy group has embraced the crackdown regardless of its political framing. The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association praised Duffy and Barrs for concrete action against fraudulent training operations, and its president, Todd Spencer, used the moment to call on Congress to pass permanent English-proficiency legislation known as Dalilah’s Law. That reaction reflects real, longstanding frustration within the industry over skills testers who have, in some documented cases, certified drivers using facilities too small to perform required maneuvers.
Still, the gap between the enforcement action’s stated purpose and its practical targeting matters for California specifically. The state operates the busiest port complex in the country and depends on a commercial trucking workforce that is disproportionately immigrant, a labor reality the federal government’s language around the crackdown does not acknowledge. If California’s fatal-crash rate for CDL holders is meaningfully better than the national average, the safety rationale for concentrating enforcement here becomes harder to defend on the numbers alone, even as the English-proficiency rule itself remains a legitimate, decades-old federal requirement.
What happens next will say more about the direction of this fight than Monday’s announcement did. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has launched a nationwide audit of third-party CDL skills testers and state oversight of those testers, a review that will eventually show whether California’s DMV has genuine certification gaps or whether the state is a proxy target in a larger immigration fight waged through highway-safety regulation. For California, the practical stakes are narrower than the political rhetoric suggests: 11 schools lose federal certification, and the DMV faces renewed scrutiny. The broader stakes are whether the state’s trucking workforce becomes the next flashpoint in an effort to fuse immigration enforcement with routine safety regulation, using data that does not clearly support the premise that its licensed drivers pose an outsized risk.
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