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threatened on Friday to withhold tens of millions of dollars in highway funds from New York unless the state rescinded commercial driver’s licenses issued to people not authorized to work in the United States.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.
