Although he spoke English when he was enrolled in a truck driver training program, Kevinson Jean, a Haitian immigrant, recalled feeling self-conscious during his commercial driver’s license exam.
“Sometimes I was afraid to pronounce something wrong,” said Jean, who covers around 100,000 miles a year as a trucker. “I didn’t want people to laugh at me.”
He recalled classmates from Iran who didn’t speak English fluently, but still passed their exams. “Nobody could understand them, but they passed,” he said.
They and other truck drivers will now be subject to roadside English proficiency tests. On Tuesday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy officially signed a directive for his department to take truck drivers off the road if they are not fluent in English. The directive puts into effect an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on April 28.
Trump’s order changes the penalty for violations of the law, which for decades has required that, as a qualification to be a commercial motor vehicle driver, a person must “read and speak the English language sufficiently to converse with the general public, to understand highway traffic signs and signals in the English language, to respond to official inquiries, and to make entries on reports and records.”
The Obama administration had relaxed the penalty from taking drivers off the road to being issued a citation.
“We are issuing guidance that ensures a driver who cannot understand English will not drive a vehicle in this country. Period. Full stop,” Duffy said in a news conference in Austin, Texas, the state with the highest number of heavy truck and tractor-trailer truck drivers.
The penalty reversal has drawn support from industry organizations who say it will improve highway safety. But there also is opposition from drivers and the industry, who have said the change risks sidelining a significant portion of the workforce without addressing core industry problems like pay, hours and trucker training.After Trump issued his order, the American Trucking Association thanked him in a statement for “responding to our concerns on the uneven application of this existing regulation.” The association named it its No. 2 concern in an April 10 letter to Duffy. Schools that fast-track training for commercial drivers’ licenses was the group’s top concern.
Duffy said his department will review security procedures for awarding commercial drivers licenses, which vary state by state, and also review credentials of “nondomiciled” domestic and international truckers — those who are not residents of the state where they hold their commercial driver’s license.
“For too long, misguided policies have prioritized political correctness over the safety of the American people,” Duffy said.
Questions over enforcement
The change has raised concern among drivers of Sikh and Punjabi background, said Mannirmal Kur, senior federal policy manager for the Sikh Coalition. She said there was a surge of Sikh and Punjab drivers from 2016 to 2018, and there are about 150,000 drivers of those backgrounds in the industry.
Like other drivers, they also want safe roads for everybody, Kur said. But “we think there is a potential for discrimination in how that English language proficiency requirement is enforced.”
Trump’s executive order raises questions over how state and local law enforcement officers certified as inspectors will decide who to pull over for an English proficiency test.
“Is it someone who has an accent or maybe someone who wears a turban?” Kur asked. “Being ordered out of service could potentially be unemployment for the truck driver … with potentially limited recourse.”
The group is awaiting more details on training and recommended that there be nationally standardized training for testing language proficiency.
An analysis of Department of Transportation data by the Women of Trucking Advisory Board to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration estimated about 3.8% of the CDL workforce is limited in English proficiency.
The industry has reported experiencing an increase in foreign-born drivers over the years, but drivers continue to be overwhelmingly white and male, according to the board’s analysis.
The number of large truck crashes and resulting fatalities and injuries fell in 2024, compared to 2023, and has been on a slide since 2021, according to Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration data.
FTR Intelligence, which provides economic forecasting for the freight industry, reported that the FMCSA recorded about 15,200 English language proficiency violations over the two years ending in March, not all by the same drivers. Texas had the largest percentage of violations at 16%, but trucks with Mexican plates were 3.4% of the total.
Jean said he expects the changed penalty will stop people who otherwise might have trained as truck drivers.
“It’s already hard to get a job if you don’t have at least a year of experience,” he said. “Now imagine adding English fluency on top of that. It’s going to take people a lot more time to find work.”
