DOT Confirms Trump Order to Get Truck Drivers Who Aren’t Proficient in English off the Road

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.

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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.

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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. {snip}

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“For too long, misguided policies have prioritized political correctness over the safety of the American people,” Duffy said.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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