The state of California on Friday faced a high stakes deadline: Defy a court order or risk losing the ability to issue CDLs entirely.
Early indications show that California likely bowed to pressure from the feds, not a state-level court, and proceeded to revoke some 17,000 wrongly issued non-domiciled CDLs.
California and the U.S. Department of Transportation have spent almost a year now clashing over English language proficiency enforcement and CDL credentialing issues for non-citizens, but lately the state has largely fallen in line with the federal crackdown.
[Related: California capitulation: CHP finally enforcing English language proficiency roadside]
The state has already lost up to $200 million in federal highway funding after a $40 million penalty for not enforcing ELP and blowing the last deadline related to those 17,000 CDLs for a hit of $160 million.
But while the feds withheld funding, legal groups representing non-domiciled CDL drivers in the state have turned up the heat.
On Thursday, legal representatives of non-domiciled CDL holders filed in state court for an emergency order to direct the California Department of Motor Vehicles to pause its cancellations of commercial driver’s licenses set to occur today, Friday, March 6.
Two days earlier, the Superior Court of California, Alameda County, ruled that California DMV needs to allows drivers with canceled licenses to immediately reapply.
"Drivers have since received confusing and inconsistent information from CA-DMV, which show that a pause is necessary to protect drivers from an indefinite period of job loss," said a release from the Sikh Coalition, one of the groups that sued California over the non-domiciled CDL revocations.
Caught between defying a court order and potentially losing the ability to issue CDLs at all, it looks like California went ahead and started revoking licenses.
"So far I haven't received a rescission letter from the DMV, but several drivers I know already have," said Fateh Singh, a California owner-operator and a cofounder of Freedom Drivers, a group fighting for the rights of non-domiciled CDL holders.
[Related: Non-domiciled CDL drivers, advocates call for California, Pennsylvania to fight DOT]
For the non-domiciled drivers who have had their licenses revoked, "it's been a nightmare -- trucks parked, loads canceled, and nobody knows whose license will be pulled next," said Singh.
Reached for comment about what exactly the Sikh Coalition expects California to do given the conflicting expectations, the org's Legal Director Munmeeth Kaur said the following:
"We are absolutely not advocating for California to lose its ability to issue commercial driver's licenses. The point of our efforts is to ensure that all qualified drivers are able to keep doing their jobs and maintaining their livelihoods without interruption. Our lawsuit has been focused on ensuring that a California agency, the DMV, follows California state law. The Court's ruling earlier this week agreed that the DMV is required to do so.
"If the federal government revokes California's licensing authorities or otherwise tries to punish the state through means like funding rescissions -- either in response to these rulings or at any point in the future -- that will be a choice made by the federal government."
Overdrive contacted the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and DOT for more clarity on what exactly is going on with California's CDL issuance but did not get a response. California DMV similarly did not offer a statement.
DOT Secretary Sean Duffy has recently struck a conciliatory tone with California, praising the state for getting on board with ELP enforcement and new CDL rules.
Further complicating the legal saga is the fact that the Alameda court ruled on an order from 2025 asking California to revoke the 17,000 non-domiciled CDLs. Since then, DOT has issued an entirely new rulemaking banning all but a very few types of non-domiciled CDLs. The FMCSA faces a Monday, March 9, deadline to respond to a federal court challenge to that rule's March 16 date of implementation.
Plaintiffs in that case against the federal rule, including owner-operator Jorge Rivera Lujan, have asked the court to stay the date of implementation pending the court's review of the rule.
[Related: Lawsuit seeks to halt FMCSA's non-domiciled CDL final rule]
