By The News Service of Florida <\/p>\n
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday denied Florida\u2019s request to prevent California and Washington from issuing licenses to commercial truck drivers who are not in the country legally.<\/p>\n
While the court didn\u2019t outline its reasons for the dismissal, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, wrote a separate opinion in dissent. Thomas noted, \u201cWe cannot refuse to hear suits between States,\u201d and that Florida \u201chas nowhere else to bring\u201d its claims.<\/p>\n
Florida filed the suit two months after semi-tractor trailer driver Harjinder Singh, a native of India, was arrested in August following a crash that stemmed from him allegedly attempting a U-turn on the turnpike in St. Lucie County. The crash resulted in three deaths. Singh was an employee of a California-based trucking company.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit alleged California and Washington have not complied with federal safety and immigration status requirements in issuing commercial driver\u2019s licenses. It argued those states \u201cchose to ignore these standards and authorize illegal immigrants without proper training or the ability to read road signs to drive commercial motor vehicles.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCalifornia\u2019s and Washington\u2019s decision to endanger their own citizens is reprehensible,\u201d the lawsuit said. \u201cBut commercial drivers routinely cross state lines, endangering citizens of other states.\u201d<\/p>\n
On February 6, the state Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles started administering driver\u2019s license tests only in English. Exams for most non-commercial driver classifications had been offered in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole.<\/p>\n
During the regular legislative session, an effort failed (SB 86 and HB 1247) that sought to require law enforcement officers to take into custody truck drivers determined to be undocumented immigrants and transfer them to federal immigration officials. The measure also would have required impounding trucks and imposing a $50,000 fine on the vehicles\u2019 owners.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By The News Service of Florida The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday denied Florida\u2019s request to prevent California…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":80924,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[232,234,233],"class_list":["post-285172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tallahassee","tag-tallahassee","tag-tallahassee-headlines","tag-tallahassee-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=285172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285172\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=285172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=285172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}