Immigration and Customs Enforcement has deputized police in states across the country to detain and arrest "criminal illegal alien" truck drivers, but even in states where the police aren't on board, the feds have begun making house calls.
As the Departments of Transportation and Homeland Security both vow to stop at nothing to "prevent illegal aliens" from getting CDLs and prosecute any current "illegal" CDL holder, this news marks an escalation in tactics.
Wyoming, Texas, Louisiana, Indiana, Alabama and Oklahoma have all partnered with ICE to ramp up immigration enforcement with raids on the highways, but DHS still frequently rails against "sanctuary states" that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.
[Related: Homeland Security explains how 'illegal aliens' get CDLs in the U.S.]
This clash between the federal government and state governments has come to a head with Washington state letting a "criminal illegal alien" walk free after causing a non-fatal pileup in the state, according to DHS, and California's consistent refusal to comply with DOT's English language enforcement and CDL licensing demands.
In early December, Steve Kotecki, a public affairs specialist at ICE, told Overdrive that the feds were making house calls.
Kotecki, based in Denver, Colorado, wouldn't get specific about what state or states such operations are happening in, but said "there is zero support from state and locals and we won’t be interacting with them at all. We won’t be working with inspectors either."
Kotecki denied this operation was taking place in Colorado, and a Colorado State Patrol spokesperson said CSP "follows state laws on immigration and are not conducting enforcement."
DHS's raids in collaboration with state and local authorities elsewhere have already resulted in hundreds of arrests of truck drivers following traffic stops.
Here's how Kotecki described the efforts in states where local cooperation is nonexistent: "Essentially what we’ll be doing is targeting drivers who are known to be illegal aliens and arresting them mostly at their homes. We won’t be doing many highway pullovers."
The house calls are "going to look more like a standard title 8 immigration enforcement," said Kotecki, referring to the federal laws governing who is allowed in, who is eligible for visas, and removal proceedings.
Previously, DOT and DHS had both expressed frustration about some states' unwillingness to comply with the Trump administration's immigration agenda, but ICE making house calls show yet again that the federal government is serious about taking non-citizen CDL drivers off the road.
Overdrive contacted DOT to ask about how it might be collaborating with ICE, and did not hear back.
In September, DHS said it had deported more than 400,000 since Trump's inauguration in January, and that an additional 1.6 million over the same time period had self-deported.
The Trump administration has put a full court press on non-citizen drivers, twisting the screws in a number of ways to make commercial trucking work unattractive or even impossible for non-citizens.
The State Department paused visa issuance for all truck driving work. DHS has imposed $500 fees for most work authorization documents, needed for CDL applications. DHS has also shortened eligible work-authorization periods from up to five years to just 18 months.
[Related: 'Every foreign truck driver's worst nightmare': Courts can't stop Trump, DOT's immigration crackdown]
DOT, of course, issued an emergency rulemaking looking to tighten eligibility for non-domiciled CDLs and push some 194,000 out of truck driving work. That rule stalled in court, but more than a dozen other states contacted by Overdrive had not yet resumed issuing non-domiciled CDLs since the stall, and may not for some time.
DOT has gone on to issue additional orders that California, New York, Pennsylvania and Minnesota all stop issuing non-domiciled CDLs and review the CDLs issued in error. Those states face loss of federal transportation funding if they don't comply. All four were heavy issuers of non-domiciled CDLs, according to FMCSA data and an Overdrive survey of all 50 states' non-domiciled CDL issuance, published in July.
California has already revoked 17,000 CDLs, and DOT now wants New York to revoke more than half of 32,000 non-domiciled CDLs the state has in circulation.
