New York Halts Immigrant Commercial Licenses After Trump Threat, School Buses Brace for Fewer Drivers

Federal crackdowns on licensing for noncitizen drivers risk compounding worker shortages across New York City’s critical transport sectors.

In the city that never sleeps, even traffic jams keep moving. But now a bureaucratic blockade threatens bedrock services: a recent federal order has caused New York State to stop issuing commercial driver licenses (CDLs) to thousands of immigrants, disrupting livelihoods and the systems that keep New Yorkers moving. As many as 200,000 workers—truckers, school bus drivers, public transit operators—face the prospect of being sidelined, victims not of misconduct, but of the crossfire between Washington and Albany.

The drama stems from the Trump administration’s recent rule change, one that links highway funding to states’ willingness to tighten CDL eligibility for “non-domiciled” applicants—primarily immigrants lawfully present in the United States. In short: New York’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has paused its non-domiciled CDL program, including renewals, after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned the state could forfeit as much as $73 million in federal highway money if it refused to comply.

The decision echoes across borough and suburb alike. Rosario Argueta, a Salvadoran visa-holder who drove a Long Island school bus for 16 years, was recently demoted to a lower-paying role after the DMV declined to renew her CDL. “They just kicked us out,” she lamented—a refrain repeated by many who now must scrape by on less, even as they struggle to support families and pay college fees.

For city agencies and private contractors, the shortfall could hardly come at a less opportune time. Paul Quinn Mori, head of the New York School Bus Contractors Association, notes that around 5% of the state’s yellow bus drivers rely on the non-domiciled program. Meanwhile, Carolyn Rinaldi, spokesperson for New York City’s largest transit workers’ union, warns of cascading effects for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and beyond. Cautiously-vetted, fingerprinted, and checked for criminal records, these drivers have long formed an essential—if often unseen—backbone of the city’s transport infrastructure.

The first-order implications are plain: more missed school runs, increased delays for goods moving through JFK or Hunts Point Market, and a heavier workload on an already stretched local workforce. In a city that prides itself on mobility, immobility is not just an inconvenience—it is a threat to daily life. School children risk longer commutes; hospital supply chains fray; small businesses lose their competitive edge.

Second-order effects loom larger still. As more immigrants lose their right to work in transport, an estimated 5,000–10,000 school bus runs could be imperiled each morning. With the local labor market for drivers already anaemic—New York schools and the MTA persistently report vacancy rates of 10–15%—the removal of this cohort will push up wages only at the margin, while translating into greater unreliability and higher costs for school districts and shippers alike.

Households such as Argueta’s now confront unpalatable choices: cutting spending, asking college-age children to work extra hours, or re-thinking tuition. For some, the loss of full-time driving work will mean a drop into the city’s swelling ranks of “working poor,” with knock-on effects for rental arrears, childcare arrangements, and even food stability. The cost of administrative rigidity, it seems, will hit the city’s most vulnerable hardest.

The motivations for Washington’s intervention are, at best, mixed. Secretary Duffy cites a spate of crashes involving “foreign drivers”—but the numbers suggest isolated incidents, not a pattern of rampant negligence. All CDL operators, whether immigrant or native-born, must undergo the same regimen of drug testing, safety training, and vetting. Sceptics could be forgiven for detecting a tinge of performative security rather than sober risk management.

Immigrant drivers, national precedents

New York is not alone in its travails. Federal threats to withhold highway funds have prompted similar license crackdowns in California, Illinois, and Texas. The American Trucking Associations report that immigrants make up one in five new entrants to the CDL workforce nationwide. With the logistics sector still reeling from pandemic-era disruptions, and supply chains only tentatively restabilized, the loss of thousands of qualified drivers bodes ill for economic buoyancy.

Globally, by contrast, major urban centers from Toronto to Berlin have opened their transport sectors—backed by robust safeguards—to skilled migrants, viewing them as an antidote to demographic stagnation and labor shortfalls. America’s appetite for immigrant drivers, by contrast, appears tepid—more grandstanding than problem-solving. This retreat seems at odds with its wheezing logistics machinery and dearth of homegrown talent.

From a classical-liberal vantage, the move portends a peculiar kind of self-harm: New York, after all, has long depended on immigrants not merely for muscle but for entrepreneurial vim and adaptability. Blocking legal residents from gainful employment in regulated sectors, in the name of “security,” forsakes pragmatism in favour of symbolism. Workers lose their jobs; children wait longer for buses; freight is delayed—while the underlying risks remain more imagined than real.

There are lawful avenues if Washington seeks to tweak national license standards—but the blunt instrument of choking off local workforces, particularly those with solid safety records, smacks less of policy than of politics. The surest outcome will likely be more strained city budgets, harried commuters, and courts (where the order now faces challenge) burdened with yet another test of federalism.

Still, New Yorkers are nothing if not adaptive. Unions and immigrant-rights groups have mounted legal challenges, and several state lawmakers have introduced bills seeking to reinstate non-domiciled CDL renewals through local provisions or “workaround” credentials.

Yet the hurry-up-and-wait approach, with livelihoods frozen while politicians jostle, is a familiar flaw of the modern American state. The more New York’s workers are forced to the sidelines, the chewier its traffic jams and the grimmer the city’s prospects for growth. As always, the city muddles through—but it would muddle better with all hands on the wheel. ■