The Trump administration has revoked the accreditation of thousands of training centers that helped people obtain commercial driver’s licenses and threatened thousands more, senior administration officials announced on Monday, amid a widening campaign against noncitizen truck drivers.
According to an announcement from the Department of Transportation, nearly 3,000 of the estimated 16,000 training providers listed in the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s Training Provider Registry have been removed “for failing to equip trainees with the Trump Administration’s standards of readiness.” The announcement said that another 4,000 had been warned that they would be removed for “noncompliance” with the standards within 30 days, unless they could prove otherwise. That could mean that more than 40 percent of U.S. training facilities would no longer be able to credential drivers.
“Under President Trump, we are reigning in illegal and reckless practices that let poorly trained drivers get behind the wheel of semi-trucks and school buses,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a statement accompanying the announcement.
For months, Mr. Duffy has been threatening consequences for centers that enable drivers without proper qualifications and authorization to get commercial licenses. To date, his warnings have focused largely on immigrant drivers and states that allow those without authorization to be in the United States to legally get behind the wheel of a truck.
The Trump administration began to raise alarms about illegal immigration in trucking after an August crash in Florida, in which an immigrant accused of being in the country without authorization made an illegal U-turn, causing a crash that killed three people.
Since then, the Department of Homeland Security has highlighted the arrests of dozens of cases of undocumented immigrants working as truck drivers. The Transportation Department in September issued emergency orders to make it more difficult for many noncitizens to obtain commercial driver’s licenses and threatened to withhold federal funding from states that failed to enforce new English-language proficiency standards for truckers or failed to revoke the licenses of drivers working in the United States without authorization.
According to a recent report by the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, an advocacy group headquartered in Arlington, Va., the changes could result in nearly 200,000 people losing their commercial driver’s licenses — among them “refugees, asylees, humanitarian parolees and DACA recipients” — worsening what some report is an already severe shortage of truckers.
Mr. Duffy and some industry experts have pushed back on the idea that there is any lack of willing American truckers. Mr. Duffy has insisted that the national shortage of truck drivers, which was widely noted during the pandemic, stemmed from falling wages due to competition from drivers without proper credentials.
Monday’s announcement made no direct references to immigration status for drivers, legal or otherwise. The training facilities facing removal had been targeted, according to the Transportation Department, because they had either falsified or manipulated training data, neglected to meet curriculum standards or instructor qualifications or failed to maintain and provide complete documentation during audits.
“If you are unwilling to follow the rules, you have no place training America’s commercial drivers,” F.M.C.S.A. Administrator Derek D. Barrs said in the announcement. “We will not tolerate negligence.”
It was not immediately clear how many would-be truckers the move would affect, though the impact could be significant if so many of the country’s training institutes were to lose their accreditation by the end of the year. People seeking a commercial driver’s license are required to complete an entry-level training course, and graduates of entities that lose their accreditation will no longer be recognized as having completed the required course of study
But the move came as welcome news to the trucking industry. In a recent letter to lawmakers, the American Trucking Associations, a trade group, called on Congress to make reforms, including steps to “expedite the removal of noncompliant training providers” from the federal government’s registry.
Late on Monday, the head of the group praised Mr. Duffy’s move.
“Training someone to operate an 80,000-pound vehicle is not a weekend hobby,” said Chris Spear, the president and chief executive of the group. He added that the Trump administration had “sent the right message” and that centers who were “issuing certificates to anyone who can fog a mirror” were “on notice.”
Karoun Demirjian is a breaking news reporter for The Times.
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