INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA — Indiana became the first state in the country to revoke all commercial driver’s licenses held by people illegally present in the United States, effective midnight Wednesday. The move follows two fatal crashes in Indiana that state officials attribute to unlicensed drivers in the country illegally.
The new law requires non-U.S. citizens to demonstrate English proficiency before applying for a CDL. It hits CDL schools and businesses with a $50,000 fine if they issue licenses or employ drivers without proper legal status. Indiana’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles must now regularly coordinate with the Department of Homeland Security to flag drivers at risk of losing their CDLs.
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita spoke to NewsNation about the state’s position. “If you don’t want to come here the right way, if you don’t want to follow our laws, and if you don’t want to be American, get the hell out,” Rokita said. He added that drivers can appeal the revocation. “If they really want to be a truck driver, and they’re really not an illegal alien and they really can speak English and they really are otherwise qualified, they’ll get their license back.”
National Context
Indiana’s law follows similar federal action earlier this month. The Trump administration introduced rules stripping up to 200,000 immigrant truck drivers of their CDLs nationwide. The federal regulations bar most immigrants from holding CDLs, with exceptions only for H-2A, H-2B, and E-2 visa holders.
Bills targeting noncitizen truck drivers have also surfaced in Arizona and Georgia. However, the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association told NewsNation that a patchwork of state laws creates confusion and that a single federal standard would be preferable.
“This stuff here has been a problem in the United States for 30 years. There’s really no set standards. So it doesn’t matter where you’re from, we’ve got to raise and elevate the bar,” said Lewie Pugh, OOIDA executive director.
On the federal level, Republican lawmakers in Congress introduced Dalilah’s Law, named after Dalilah Coleman, who was severely injured when a truck driver in the country illegally struck her family’s car in 2024. The bill would codify Trump’s English-only CDL testing executive order, limit CDLs to certain visa holders, and create a death penalty aggravating factor for drivers who kill someone in a crash. States that refuse to comply would lose federal transportation funding.
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