The Trump administration threatened on Friday to withhold tens of millions of dollars in highway funds from New York unless the state rescinded commercial driver’s licenses issued to people not authorized to work in the United States.
New York is the latest state to come into the cross hairs of the Transportation Department as the Trump administration attempts to prevent undocumented immigrant drivers from operating trucks and other large vehicles requiring commercial driver’s licenses. Last month, California agreed to revoke the driving credentials of some 17,000 foreign nationals after coming under similar pressure.
But Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy took special aim at New York at a news conference on Friday. He called the state “the worst offender” for issuing commercial driver’s licenses to foreign nationals without sufficient proof of their long-term work authorization. He also threatened to pull $73 million in federal highway funding unless officials paused issuing all non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses and learner’s permit and voided the active licenses of any immigrants found to be driving without legal work permits. The state was given 30 days to respond to the administration’s demands.
Derek D. Barrs, the administrator of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, added that if New York failed to act within 30 days, the state could also lose its certification to issue any commercial driver’s licenses.
New York’s commercial driver’s license standards, he charged, represented “a systematically grossly unacceptable deviation from federal safety regulations.”
“When improper licenses are issued, safety is compromised,” he added.
In a statement, Walter McClure, a spokesman for New York’s Department of Motor Vehicles, accused federal transportation officials of “lying about New York State.”
“Here is the truth: Commercial drivers licenses are regulated by the federal government, and New York State DMV has, and will continue to, comply with federal rules,” he said.
“This is just another stunt from Secretary Duffy, and it does nothing to keep our roads safer,” he added.
Mr. Duffy and Mr. Barrs have based their criticism of New York on a federal audit of 200 non-domiciled commercial licenses. They said more than half of those license-holders no longer had proper authorization to work in the United States and cited examples in which they said New York had issued credentials to foreigners who didn’t have proper work authorization at the time of their application.
Using that evidence, they questioned whether New York had verified the immigration status of the approximately 32,000 people holding active non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses holders from the state. They also pointed out that the state regularly issued noncitizen commercial driver’s licenses that were valid for eight years, even if applicants did not have work visas that lasted that long.
“They’re not verifying the legal status of that individual,” Mr. Duffy said, arguing that New York was not routinely checking applicants’ passports or visas to verify their continued work eligibility.
Mr. McClure, the New York D.M.V. spokesman, countered that every commercial driver’s license was “subject to verification of an applicant’s lawful status through federally issued documents reviewed in accordance with federal regulations.”
The Trump administration has been pursuing a variety of initiatives to prevent certain immigrants from procuring commercial driver’s licenses. Earlier this year, Mr. Duffy’s department added a nationwide requirement that truckers meet new English-language proficiency standards. Earlier this month, his department revoked the accreditation of thousands of training centers where he said drivers improperly received their licenses.
The centerpiece of the effort, however, has been the department’s effort to pressure certain states to revoke licenses for noncitizen drivers already on the road, largely by threatening to withhold critical highway funds. The urgency around the effort increased after an August crash in Florida, in which an immigrant holding a California-issued commercial driver’s license and accused of being in the country without authorization killed three people after making an illegal U-turn.
Mr. Duffy has been criticized for focusing his efforts on states led by Democratic governors. But he argued on Friday that the threats to California and New York were just about numbers. Together, the two states issue over half of the country’s non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses, he said.
“You don’t just drive in New York if you get a New York commercial driver’s license. You drive around the country,” Mr. Duffy said. “These unqualified drivers operate in every single state, so everybody’s at risk,” he added.
Karoun Demirjian is a breaking news reporter for The Times.
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