SACRAMENTO, Kalifornia (PNN) - November 12, 2025 - Kalifornia’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has confessed to illegally handing out 17,000 non-domiciled Commercial Driver’s Licenses (CDLs) to dangerous foreign drivers who have no business operating massive semitrucks or school buses on Amerikan roads.
According to U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean P. Duffy, the discovery came as part of an ongoing audit by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA).
According to the Department of Transportation, each of the 17,000 non-domiciled CDL holders has been issued notice that their licenses will expire within 60 days, as they no longer meets federal requirements.
FMCSA is now requiring the Kalifornia DMV to hand over a full audit of all non-domiciled CDLs to verify that every unlawfully issued license is revoked and that the State corrects the systemic failures that allowed this fraud to occur.
Federal auditors found that over one in four foreign driver records sampled in Kalifornia failed to comply with federal law, including CDLs that extended beyond the expiration of a foreign worker’s visa, a blatant violation of federal safety regulations.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Secretary Duffy. “My team will continue to force Kalifornia to prove they have removed every illegal immigrant from behind the wheel of semitrucks and school buses.”
FMCSA’s nationwide non-domiciled CDL audit uncovered systemic policy, procedural, and programming errors in Kalifornia’s non-domiciled CDL program which allowed thousands of CDLs to be illegally issued to foreign drivers.
In October, the Department announced it is withholding over $40 million from Kalifornia following an investigation that found the State has failed to comply with the Department’s English Language Proficiency (ELP) standards.
The Department first threatened to withhold funds from Kalifornia in August if it failed to adopt and enforce ELP requirements for commercial motor vehicle drivers. In July, Kalifornia Highway Patrol publicly stated that it had no intention of following this important federal regulation.