Of the 126,525 people in Colorado licensed to drive 18-wheelers, school buses and trucks carrying hazardous materials, 1,745 are immigrants who do not have permanent legal status to live in the United States.
That number won’t rise anytime soon, if ever.
Colorado paused new licenses and renewals for immigrants without citizenship or green cards after the Trump administration announced “emergency action” in September to drastically restrict who is eligible for commercial driver’s licenses. The new restrictions include refugees, asylum seekers and people protected by DACA, or Deferred Action for Child Arrivals.
The Colorado Department of Revenue added a bright-yellow notice at the top of its website this fall saying that commercial driver’s licenses for what are called “non-domiciled” residents were on hold “until further notice.”
After a request from The Colorado Sun, the department released the current number of active commercial driver’s licenses for foreign nationals with temporary lawful status, but said it could not provide a timeframe for when those licenses were given or how many were received in the past few months.
The federal policy change, which followed a deadly truck crash in Florida involving a driver from India who made an illegal U-turn, has advocates nationwide concerned about the financial impact on immigrants who sought careers as truck drivers.
Among them is a Colorado immigrant from Afghanistan who was picked up during an ICE sting at a weigh station in Indiana. Mohammad Ali Dadfar, an asylum seeker who had worked alongside the U.S. government fighting the Taliban before fleeing the country, had been a long-haul truck driver for only a few weeks when he was taken into custody in October.
He is being held in a Missouri detention center, while his wife tries to support their four children in Boulder County. Dadfar has a valid commercial driver’s license and a work permit.
Dadfar received his training at CDL 303, a Commerce City company that has graduated 120 commercial driver’s license recipients since it opened in 2023. Dadfar was an “excellent student and did everything by the book,” said Scott Maurer, co-owner of CDL 303.
The company has trained a handful of students who are new immigrants but does all of its training in English, Maurer said. “They always ask, ‘Do you teach in Spanish?’ and we say no because in Colorado the test has to be in English,” he said. “We had one guy that came through and could converse a bit, but when taking instruction in the cab and reading the handbook he couldn’t do it. We had to let him go.”
Not all training companies operate that way, however, Maurer said. “CDL mills” that provide almost no training and graduate students without basic English skills do exist, even in Colorado, he said. The industry is always in need of drivers, mainly because drivers get burned out within a couple of years working for corporate trucking companies for little pay, he said.
Instead of cracking down on the bad actors in the industry, the blanket federal policy will mean many immigrants are left without work, he said. “They will be basically shut out of the industry,” Maurer said, whose company also runs a mountain truck driving school.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy directed all states Sept. 29 to pause the issuance of commercial driver’s licenses for immigrants without permanent legal status. Colorado suspended its program while it is “making the required changes to comply with the new federal rule,” Jennifer Giambi, state Department of Motor Vehicles communications supervisor, said via email.
Licenses issued before the pause are still valid, unless a federally required audit finds that they were not issued under compliance regulations, she said. “Colorado is complying with this directive and auditing its program,” Giambi said.
In Colorado, all applicants for commercial driver’s licenses, whether they are immigrants or not, must pass a written test, complete a federally approved safety course and pass a federally approved road skills test. Federal regulations require English proficiency, and the road skills test happens only in English. The written test, however, is available in Spanish, Giambi said.
Federal officials are threatening to withhold about $75 million in transportation funding from Pennsylvania if that state does not revoke commercial driver’s licenses it says were illegally issued to immigrants. In California, state officials said they would revoke 17,000 commercial driver’s licenses given to immigrants after discovering the expiration dates went past when the drivers were legally allowed to be in the country.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s new rules are up in the air while they’re sorted out in court. A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., in November blocked the federal policy to limit commercial driver’s licenses to immigrants unless they are citizens or have green cards.
In the ruling, the court said data from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration shows that immigrants who hold commercial driver’s licenses account for about 5% of all of those types of licenses, but about 0.2% of all fatal crashes.
In addition to the new rule about who can get a license, the Trump administration released an order in May saying commercial truck drivers would lose their licenses if they cannot read and understand traffic signs and communicate in English at weigh stations, border patrol entrances and agricultural checkpoints.