By The Trump administration is moving from kicking unqualified truck drivers off the road to shutting down the schools accused of putting them there in the first place.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Monday that the Department of Transportation is taking emergency action against 110 commercial driver’s license training schools accused of fraudulently certifying illegal immigrants and other unqualified drivers.
“Today, what we are announcing is an emergency executive shutdown of 110 driving schools,” Duffy said during a press conference in Detroit. The administration is also shutting down another 160 schools that Duffy said lacked adequate training facilities, properly licensed instructors or the ability to actually train students behind the wheel, according to Just The News.
Duffy said the first 110 schools were among the worst offenders and were tied to more than 5,000 drivers who later failed federal English-language proficiency checks.
That requirement is not new. Federal English-proficiency standards for commercial drivers have existed since 1937, requiring truckers to be able to read road signs, communicate with officials and respond to basic questions. But a 2016 Obama administration policy stopped inspectors from placing drivers out of service solely because they failed an English-proficiency evaluation. President Donald Trump reversed that policy in April 2025, and DOT is now moving to make the tougher enforcement standard permanent.
The results have exposed just how widespread the problem had become.
Since Trump ordered the crackdown, DOT says more than 26,000 commercial drivers have been taken out of service for failing English tests, more than 30,000 improperly issued licenses have been revoked from foreign drivers and thousands of questionable training providers have been purged from the federal registry. A separate February enforcement action targeted more than 550 alleged “CDL mills” after inspectors found schools using unqualified instructors, improper vehicles and incomplete testing procedures.
The crackdown follows a series of cases that raised questions about how some foreign drivers were getting commercial licenses in the first place.
In August 2025, New Conservative Post reported on the case of Harjinder Singh, an illegal immigrant from India accused of making an illegal U-turn with a tractor-trailer on Florida’s Turnpike, causing a crash that killed three people. Federal officials said Singh had received a California CDL despite later answering just two of 12 questions correctly during an English-language assessment and identifying only one of four highway signs.
Then, in October, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation into the Chinese American Trucker Organization USA Inc., or CATOU, a New York-based organization whose leader had ties to groups connected to the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front apparatus. The organization claimed to have helped more than 1,000 Chinese nationals obtain CDLs with a “100% success rate,” while videos reviewed by the outlet showed at least one migrant who entered the United States illegally receiving help obtaining a California commercial license.
Those reports helped reveal that the problem extended beyond individual drivers. Schools, recruiters, state licensing systems and employers could all serve as links in a chain that ultimately put poorly trained or ineligible drivers behind the wheel of trucks weighing as much as 80,000 pounds.
DOT and Homeland Security began jointly investigating suspected CDL-school fraud in July, initially identifying roughly 75 training schools suspected of falsifying records, improperly certifying drivers or failing to provide required training. The administration said at the time that nearly 10,000 training schools had already been removed from the federal registry as part of its broader cleanup.
The latest action dramatically expands that effort.
Duffy was joined in Detroit by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and officials involved with the White House’s anti-fraud effort. Earlier this month, DOT and DHS also announced that Operation Highway Shield had detained illegal immigrants driving commercial trucks and removed additional unqualified drivers and vehicles during roadside inspections across Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and Ohio.
Major trucking groups have generally supported removing fraudulent or substandard schools, arguing that poorly trained drivers endanger both motorists and professional truckers who followed the rules. Some industry officials have warned that eliminating large numbers of training providers could lengthen waiting lists at legitimate schools, while critics of the administration’s broader immigration enforcement have argued that lawful immigrant drivers could face increased scrutiny.
But the administration’s argument is increasingly straightforward: If a school cannot provide qualified instructors, legitimate training and honest certifications, it should not be producing drivers entrusted with an 80,000-pound truck on an American highway.
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