A federal court is blocking a Trump Administration rule limiting non-citizens’ ability to acquire commercial driver’s licenses — implemented following recent fatal crashes involving foreign truck drivers — arguing that it would make Americans less safe.

In September, the Department of Transportation announced “emergency action” to “drastically restrict who is eligible for a non-domiciled commercial learner’s permits.” The rule would have prevented non-citizens from acquiring non-domiciled CDL licenses unless they met a “much stricter set of rules,” such as acquiring an “employment-based visa and undergoing a mandatory federal immigration status check.” The rule change came after an illegal immigrant from India was arrested and charged with multiple felony counts for allegedly causing a fatal crash in Florida. 

However, on Thursday, a three-judge panel on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia blocked the rule, finding that the administration did not follow the proper process for submitting the rule, and that the data shows Americans are safer with non-domiciled drivers on the road. 

Judge Florence Pan, who was appointed by President Biden, and Judge Robert Wilkins, who was appointed by President Obama, found that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, or FMCSA, erred when it issued the rule because it did not consult with states. The FMCSA argued that it did not engage in the consultation process because the “total cost to states of complying with these new regulations is not expected to be substantial,” and because it was “not practical to do so.” 

The judges said that the government’s “own data” shows that non-domiciled CDL holders “account for approximately 5 percent of all CDL holders but only about 0.2 percent of fatal crashes.”

“Given the FMCSA’s anticipation that less-experienced drivers would replace the non-domiciled ones forced out of the market, it does not appear to have shown that the rule would produce any net safety benefit,” the judges said.

They said that the petitions had shown evidence that the rule would “replace safer experienced drivers with less-safe new drivers.”

Additionally, they said the petitions have “shown that they

face irreparable harm because the rule threatens destruction of the individual petitioners’ businesses.”

Judge Karen Henderson, a President Bush appointee, dissented, arguing that the FMCSA should be able to bypass the advanced notice requirement of its rule change due to the agency’s concern that it would lead to a “surge of disqualified drivers obtaining CDL licenses” before it took effect. 

Judge Henderson also said that the rule change helped close a kind of loophole in the process for non-domiciled drivers obtaining CDLs. She noted that states are already required to check an applicant’s driving record. However, she said, “The states have been ‘unable to carry out this requirement’ with respect to foreign-domiciled CDL-applicants because their “driving histor[ies] exist predominantly or entirely within a foreign jurisdiction.”

“The FMCSA reasonably concluded that by ‘reducing the number of non-domiciled . . . CDL drivers with unknown driver safety records on the Nation’s roadways,’ its rule would increase driver safety,” Judge Henderson said. “It should go without saying that our Nation’s roadways are safer the fewer people there are operating eighteen-wheelers, buses and delivery trucks with unchecked driving histories.”

She noted that the FMCSA provided five examples of “recent fatal crashes” where non-domiciled CDL drivers were blamed for the accidents. In three of those cases, the drivers had previously received citations for speeding or not following traffic signals.

While she said that the FCMSA did not argue that those five examples constituted an “exhaustive” list, she said, “It was well within the agency’s policy judgment to determine that five fatal crashes (which claimed the lives of 12 individuals — two of whom were children) were five crashes too many.”

The DOT did not respond to the Sun’s request for comment by the time of publication.