North Carolina may lose $50M in federal funds over flawed immigrant trucker licenses

The issue started to generate headlines after a truck driver who was not authorized to be in the U.S. made an illegal U-turn and caused a crash in Florida that killed three people in August.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration reviewed 50 commercial driver's licenses that North Carolina had issued to immigrants in its audit and found problems with more than half of them. That's what prompted the threat to withhold funding if the state doesn't clean up its licensing program. Records show that 924 of these kind of licenses remain unexpired in North Carolina.

“North Carolina’s failure to follow the rules isn’t just shameful — it’s dangerous," Duffy said.

North Carolina DMV spokesman Marty Homan said the state is working to address the concerns and remains “committed to upholding safety and integrity in our licensing processes.”

Duffy has pulled nearly $200 million from California over concerns about that state's licensing practices and its decision to delay the revocations of more than 17,000 invalid licenses. Duffy also said that California isn’t enforcing English proficiency requirements for truckers.

He also previously threatened to withhold millions of dollars in federal funding from Pennsylvania, Minnesota, New York, Texas, South Dakota, Colorado, and Washington after audits found significant problems under the existing rules, including commercial licenses being valid long after an immigrant truck driver’s work permit expired.

Separately, Tennessee announced Thursday that it launched its own review of commercial driver's licenses and will be notifying about 8,800 of the state's 150,000 commercial driver's license holders that they need to provide proof of citizenship or a valid visa if they want to keep their licenses.

Russell Shoup, who is assistant commissioner of Tennessee's Driver Services Division, said the state is working to make sure all the licenses the state has issued meet current state and federal standards.

The federal crackdown on commercial driver's licensing has been praised by trucking groups. The industry said that too often unqualified drivers who shouldn’t have licenses or can’t speak English have been allowed to get behind the wheel of an 80,000-pound (about 39,916 kilograms) truck. They have also applauded the Transportation Department’s moves to go after questionable commercial driver’s license schools.

But immigrant groups say that some drivers are now being unfairly targeted. The spotlight has been on Sikh truckers because the driver in the Florida crash and the driver in another fatal crash in California in October are both Sikhs. So the Sikh Coalition, a national group defending the civil rights of Sikhs, and the San Francisco-based Asian Law Caucus filed a class-action lawsuit against California over that state's plan to revoke thousands of licenses.

Immigrants account for about 20% of all truck drivers, but these non-domiciled licenses immigrants can receive only represent about 5% of all commercial driver’s licenses or about 200,000 drivers. The Transportation Department also proposed new restrictions that would severely limit which noncitizens could get a license, but a court put the new rules on hold.

Associated Press writer Gary Robertson from Raleigh, North Carolina, contributed to this report.