The Transportation Department has ordered 110 commercial driver’s license schools to close immediately, claiming their truck-driving graduates could not demonstrate English-language proficiency.
Together the schools enrolled about 5,000 drivers who failed roadside English-language proficiency tests that the Transportation Department said were necessary to ensure road safety.
The language requirement was strengthened by the Trump administration more than a year ago amid a crackdown on alleged abuses within the industry.
“You have to speak English to operate a vehicle,” Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy said Monday in Detroit. “I didn’t create that rule. President Trump didn’t create that rule. That rule has been in place for decades.”
While a command of English has been required for truck drivers for decades, the Obama administration loosened the rules in 2016, allowing drivers who failed the tests to be ticketed rather than pulled off the road.
But in early 2025, Trump and Duffy signed orders bolstering enforcement by ordering drivers who violated the English proficiency rules to be placed “out-of-service.”
No data shows a correlation between English proficiency and commercial truck-driver accidents, analysts say, worrying advocates who fear Latino drivers may be unfairly targeted by officers. Since last year’s crackdown, trucking schools have rushed to prepare their students for the roadside exams.
The Department of Homeland Security said Monday that it had conducted a “synchronized single-day sweep” targeting more than 200 training schools in about two dozen states.
Officials are taking steps to shut down another 160 schools for noncompliance, including what Duffy described as schools that “don’t have adequate space to put a potential driver in a truck and have them go around the cones and do the turns” and have “unlicensed instructors.”
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin connected the closures to the broader effort to remove undocumented immigrants from the country.
“Thanks to the recklessness of sanctuary politicians, there is a growing and alarming trend of illegal aliens being granted commercial driver’s licenses,” Mullin said in a news release.
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