U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy speaks during a press conference to discuss the government shutdown’s impact on aviation safety workers and travel at Philadelphia International Airport on October 24, 2025 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.
Rachel Wisniewski Reuters
The Trump administration announced Wednesday that it has removed about 10,000 commercial truck drivers from U.S. roads because they don’t speak English well.
The boast comes as trucking companies are sounding the alarm about drivers being targeted by President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.
“We fired 9,500 truck drivers because they couldn’t speak English, our national language!” Transport Secretary Sean Duffy told the X-Post.
“This administration will always prioritize the safety of you and your family,” Duffy said.
Duffy was responding to a Bloomberg report detailing the negative impact on the trucking industry from new language policies and other regulations.
The industry, already facing lower freight volumes and higher overhead costs, is bracing for a significant reduction in the supply of drivers due to federal enforcement, Bloomberg reports.
In early March, President Trump signed an executive order designating English as the country’s official language.
In April, the president signed another order directing Duffy to ensure that commercial truck drivers who don’t meet English proficiency requirements are fired.
The order reverses an Obama-era policy in which the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration said it directed officials to issue citations to commercial drivers who violated British standards, but did not remove them from service.
The enhanced enforcement policy went into effect in late June.
More than 9,500 motorists were pulled off the road, with the most injured in Texas and Wyoming, Bloomberg reported.
The Trump administration has drawn a link between the surge in migrants during former President Joe Biden’s administration and concerns about road safety.
In late June, Duffy announced a national audit of states’ practices in issuing “non-domicile” commercial driver’s licenses, with a particular focus on “the potential for unqualified individuals to obtain licenses and pose a danger to our roadways.”
“The previous administration’s open border policy allowed millions of people to flow into our country and led to serious suspicions that the trucking permit system was being abused,” Duffy said at the time.
The administration cited the criminal case of Harjinder Singh, a commercial truck driver accused of causing a fatal crash on Florida’s Turnpike in August, as an example of the “lawlessness” of the trucking industry.
After the accident, the Department of Transportation issued emergency regulations restricting the issuance of commercial licenses to non-U.S. persons.
Duffy’s office announced in October that it was withholding more than $40 million from California after finding that the state was not adhering to English proficiency standards.
