Border Patrol agents stopped a commercial truck at an inland checkpoint near Blythe, California, where they discovered the driver — a 25-year-old Indian national with a valid New York commercial license — was in the U.S. illegally. The arrest comes amid a court battle over the Department of Transportation’s restrictions on illegal immigrants obtaining commercial driver’s licenses.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blasted a court ruling Monday that denied the Trump administration’s request to block illegal immigrants from obtaining CDLs. ‘We’re not going to take this lying down,’ Duffy said on ‘The Ingraham Angle.’ ‘We are going to do all we can to protect the American people.’ His comments came after a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., ruled last Thursday that the Department of Transportation’s restrictions could not be enforced.
Such restrictions were announced in September, after illegal immigrant truck driver Harjinder Singh was accused of causing a crash involving a tractor-trailer that killed three people in Fort Pierce, Florida. The judges said the federal government failed to follow proper procedure or explain how the rule would promote safety. The court also noted that Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration data shows about 5% of all commercial driver’s licenses belong to immigrants, though they account for just 0.2% of fatal crashes.
Duffy attributed much of the blame to the Biden administration, which he said allowed millions of illegal immigrants to enter, granted them work authorizations and then let them seek CDLs. ‘People are dying,’ he said. ‘And we thought it was appropriate to protect Americans and we should have an emergency rule, not to go through the month-long process. We did that. The court has rolled us back and said, ‘Well, we’re not quite sure this is an emergency. We want to see more data.’ And I’m like… ‘Watch any show on television, and you’ll see the risk to the American people.’