The owner-operator, unions and other plaintiffs who sued in October to block the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's first attempt to kick almost 200,000 non-domiciled CDL holders out of commercial driving has once again called for a review.
A petition filed on Thursday by CDL drivers Jorge Rivera Lujan and Aleksei Semenovskii; the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees; the AFL-CIO; and American Federation of Teachers asks for a court to review the FMCSA's recently published final rule stripping CDL eligibility from nearly all non-citizens.
[Related: Meet the owner-op who stopped FMCSA's non-domiciled CDL purge]
Those same petitioners succeeded in November in pausing the previous version of the rule. Now in the same venue, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the petitioners seek a look at the new rule.
The current petition only asks the court to review the rule, but last time around it was quickly followed by an emergency motion to stay the rule, which the court granted.
In the first legal clash, the court found the petitioners "will likely succeed" on the claim that FMCSA "improperly issued the rule" without without prior “consultation with the States," as required by federal law.
The court also in November knocked FMCSA for admitting it didn't have sufficient evidence that non-domiciled CDL drivers are a public safety threat. The initial rule conceded as much. Instead of using statistical data, it highlighted just five deadly crashes caused by non-domiciled drivers.
According "to the FMCSA’s own data, non-domiciled CDL holders account for approximately five percent of all CDL holders but only about 0.2 percent of fatal crashes," the court wrote.
The court's reading of the situation also led it to believe that less-experienced drivers would replace current non-domiciled CDL drivers.
FMCSA's new rulemaking added further justification, detailing "17 fatal crashes in 2025 that were caused by actions of non-domiciled CDL holders whose fitness could not be ensured and thus would be ineligible under this new rule," the agency said in the rule's text. "These crashes resulted in 30 fatalities and numerous severe injuries, underscoring the lethal consequences of allowing unvetted operators behind the wheel of CMVs."
[Related: FMCSA investigating chameleon carrier network after deadly Indiana crash]
The agency called for an overhaul of the entire license process, citing systemic, widespread issues found in states' CDL programs for non-citizens, which led to Utah, North Carolina, California, Colorado, New York, Pennsylvania and Minnesota all being found in non-compliance with federal regulations.
"FMCSA believes that the previous [State]-administered process for foreign-domiciled drivers was insufficient to screen for high-risk drivers," the agency said in the rule.
The new rule thus calls for completely ending the practice of accepting Employment Authorization Documents in CDL applications and instead restricting eligibility to holders of "specific valid employment-based nonimmigrant" statuses.
By limiting eligibility to holders of H-2A (Temporary Agricultural Workers), H-2B (Temporary Non-Agricultural Workers), and E-2 (Treaty Investors) visas, who undergo "consular vetting" and "interagency screening" (through collaboration with the Department of State), the rule "restores the integrity of the CDL system, closes a significant safety gap, and enhances the safety of the traveling public," the agency said.
Restricting CDL eligibility to those groups would cut the non-domiciled CDL population down from 200,000 to just 6,000 over the next five years, FMCSA wrote.
FMCSA's recent rulemaking did respond to numerous challenges brought to the September rulemaking, including challenges that mirror those brought by the petitioners.
[Related: DOT's non-domiciled CDL crackdown went down in flames on the Federal Register, but owner-ops love it]
The agency specifically addressed cases like that of Jorge Rivera Lujan, an owner-op who came to this country at the age of two and has been documented in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program for well more than a decade.
Rivera contends that since he came to this country at a young age, he has a complete driving record to present with his CDL application, just like a U.S. citizen might. The other driver named in the case, Aleksei Semenovskii, as an asylum seeker and a recent arrival to the country, would not have much of a driving record in the U.S.
Yet FMCSA declined to exempt DACA recipients from the ban, reasoning that they too rely on EADs, and that states' handling of EADs had proven untenable.
Though the petitioners succeeded last time, and Rivera ultimately did get his CDL extended by Utah for a year, most states chose not to restart their non-domiciled CDL program. Many were under specific orders not to.
Now, the new rule will once again put a blanket ban in place when it takes effect in 30 days.
