Eleven California commercial truck-driving schools have been shut down as federal officials intensify enforcement of English-language requirements for truck drivers.
Eleven commercial truck driving schools in California have been ordered to shut down as part of a sweeping federal crackdown on English language proficiency among commercial truck drivers, putting California near the center of the Trump administration’s effort to tighten enforcement across the trucking industry.
The Transportation Department announced Monday that it had ordered 110 commercial driver training schools nationwide to stop operating after investigators found that graduates of those schools were linked to more than 5,000 violations involving federal English proficiency requirements. California accounted for 11 of the schools, the third highest number among the states identified. Texas and Pennsylvania each had 13.
Federal officials said the schools were among the most serious offenders because each had certified at least 10 drivers who were later cited during roadside inspections for failing to meet English language requirements.
The action is part of a much broader crackdown. The Transportation Department said another 160 commercial driving schools are being shut down for other violations, including inadequate training facilities and unlicensed instructors. In all, the administration announced the closure of 270 schools.
The English requirement itself is not new.
Federal rules have long required commercial drivers to be able to read and speak English well enough to communicate with the public, understand highway traffic signs and signals, respond to official inquiries and make required reports.
What has changed is enforcement.
The Trump administration has moved to more aggressively remove drivers from the road when they fail the English proficiency requirement. The federal government has also increased scrutiny of how states issue commercial driver’s licenses and how training schools and third party testers certify drivers.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has described the effort as a road safety measure. Federal officials say the training schools were allowing drivers to enter the industry without meeting standards that apply to commercial operators.
California has been singled out repeatedly by the administration.
At a news conference Monday, federal officials said many of the licenses they believe were improperly issued came from California, New York and Illinois. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin called California one of the states with the most serious problems.
One California school cited by federal officials was Platinum Plus Truck Driving School in Fresno. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration said the school certified 36 drivers who were later cited for English proficiency violations. One of those trainees was involved in a fatal crash in Oklahoma, according to the agency.
The administration’s campaign is particularly significant in California, where commercial trucking is deeply connected to the state’s economy and immigrant workers make up a substantial part of the workforce.
For drivers who learned English as a second language, the intensified enforcement can have immediate consequences.
A driver who fails an English proficiency assessment can be placed out of service and prevented from continuing to operate commercially. For someone who depends on trucking for a living, being taken off the road can mean lost work and lost income.
The federal government says the requirement is about safety, not immigration status.
But the crackdown is taking place alongside the Trump administration’s broader immigration enforcement campaign, and federal officials have explicitly connected the trucking initiative to efforts to identify and remove undocumented immigrants from the commercial driving industry.
That has made the issue particularly sensitive in California, where immigrant and Latino workers are an important part of the transportation workforce.
The administration has also targeted commercial driver’s licenses issued to non domiciled drivers. California officials have said the federal government has required the state to cancel thousands of such licenses, adding another layer of uncertainty for drivers and trucking companies.
The result is a rapidly changing environment for California’s trucking industry.
Driving schools are facing greater scrutiny. Drivers are facing more aggressive roadside enforcement. State officials are confronting federal demands over how commercial licenses are issued.
For California, the shutdown of 11 schools is more than a number.
It signals that the federal government is moving beyond individual drivers and targeting the training system that puts commercial truck drivers on the road in the first place.
The debate over the crackdown will likely continue to center on two competing questions.
How should the government make sure that people operating large commercial vehicles are properly trained and able to communicate with authorities?
And how can that enforcement be carried out without unfairly targeting immigrant workers or turning a longstanding safety requirement into another tool of immigration enforcement?
For California, those questions are now playing out across the trucking industry, from driving schools and testing centers to the workers behind the wheel.
