A week after immigrant groups filed a lawsuit, California said Tuesday it would delay the revocations of 17,000 commercial driver\u2019s licenses until March to allow more time to ensure that truckers and bus drivers who legally qualify for the licenses can keep them.<\/p>\n
California decided to revoke the licenses after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy pressured the state to make sure immigrants who are in the country illegally aren\u2019t granted the licenses. The Transportation Department has been prioritizing the issue ever since a truck driver who was not authorized to be in the U.S. made an illegal U-turn and caused a crash in Florida that killed three people in August. <\/p>\n
Duffy didn\u2019t immediately comment on the delay. California officials are working to make sure the federal Transportation Department is satisfied with the reforms they have put in place. The state had planned to resume issuing commercial driver\u2019s licenses in mid-December, but the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration blocked that.<\/p>\n
\u201cCommercial drivers are an important part of our economy \u2014 our supply chains don\u2019t move, and our communities don\u2019t stay connected without them,\u201d DMV Director Steve Gordon said. <\/p>\n
The Sikh Coalition, a national group defending the civil rights of Sikhs, and the San Francisco-based Asian Law Caucus filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the California drivers. They said immigrant truck drivers were being unfairly targeted. The driver in the Florida crash and the driver in another fatal crash in California in October are both Sikhs.<\/p>\n
Immigrants account for about 20% of all truck drivers, but these nondomiciled licenses immigrants can receive represent only about 5% of all commercial driver\u2019s licenses, or about 200,000 drivers. The Transportation Department also proposed new restrictions that would severely limit which noncitizens could get a license, but a court put the new rules on hold. <\/p>\n
Mumeeth Kaur, the legal director of the Sikh Coalition, said this delay was \u201can important step towards alleviating the immediate threat that these drivers are facing to their lives and livelihoods.\u201d<\/p>\n
Duffy threatened to withhold millions of dollars in federal funding from California, Pennsylvania and Minnesota after audits found significant problems under the existing rules, such as commercial licenses being valid long after an immigrant truck driver\u2019s work permit expired.<\/p>\n
Trucking trade groups have praised the effort to get unqualified drivers who shouldn\u2019t have licenses or can\u2019t speak English off the road. They also applauded the Transportation Department\u2019s moves to go after questionable commercial driver\u2019s license schools. <\/p>\n
Funk writes for the Associated Press. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A week after immigrant groups filed a lawsuit, California said Tuesday it would delay the revocations of 17,000…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":114495,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[61245,7,61244,9,8,7200,350,8832,7524,553,3982,1846,20094,32627,8484,8485,7197,7199],"class_list":["post-114494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-bus-driver","tag-california","tag-california-delay","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-commercial-driver","tag-crash","tag-duffy","tag-federal-funding","tag-florida","tag-immigrant","tag-lawsuit","tag-license","tag-new-rule","tag-sikh-coalition","tag-sikhs","tag-transportation-department","tag-truck-driver"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114494\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/114495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}