The DOT’s sweeping new rule seeking to purge nearly 200,000 non-domiciled CDL holders from truck driving has come under fire as a possible violation of civil rights in comments filed to the Federal Register.
DOT in September made the unprecedented move of putting out an Interim Final Rule (IFR) that outright seeks to boot 194,000 non-citizen CDL holders from the trucking industry, citing widespread problems with CDL issuance and five deadly crashes this year involving non-domiciled drivers.
That's 194,000 drivers who presumably hold a job and paid good money for a CDL that the government now plans to strip from them in part in the name of safety. Yet the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration itself said there's no rock-solid evidence that these drivers are generally less safe than others.
"There is not sufficient evidence, derived from well-designed, rigorous, quantitative analyses, to reliably demonstrate a measurable empirical relationship between the nation of domicile for a CDL driver and safety outcomes in the United States such as changes in frequency and/or severity of crashes or changes in frequency of violations," FMCSA's IFR states.
Rather than cite such a big study, FMCSA outlines five recent, horrific crashes involving non-domiciled drivers. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and FMCSA itself consistently catalog about 5,000 fatal truck-involved crashes annually.
Overdrive readers tend to agree with FMCSA on the safety front, with 64% of readers earlier this year noting opposition to non-domiciled CDLs issued to non-citizens on safety and economic fairness grounds.
"If a government agency enacts a rule that explicitly discriminates based on immigration status, we would like them to show evidence that they expect there to be some kind of safety benefit," said Mannirmal Kaur, senior federal policy manager at the Sikh Coalition, an organization that advocates for the rights of immigrants.
