ROOKE: Trump Administration Making Two Moves To Crack Down On Immigration This Week And It’s Only Monday
The Trump administration is leaving no stone unturned in its recent crusade against cheap foreign labor, finally giving 2024 voters what they want.
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Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Monday that the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) took emergency action to revoke the commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs) of 270 schools for failing basic training standards.
“USDOT has spent the last year-and-a-half strengthening the rules of the road and removing dangerous foreign drivers from our trucking industry,” Duffy said. “To fully root out the scourge of fraud, hold criminals accountable, and restore safety, we need the support of federal law enforcement. I am so grateful for President Trump raising the alarm on this issue, and to Vice President Vance for leading the charge to crack down on fraud nationwide. From states failing to follow the law to shady training schools and illicit companies, together we will tackle every link in the chain.”
USDOT, along with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), announced a partnership in July to crack down on CDL schools that were committing “fraudulent and illegal practices.” Their joint investigations found 110 CDL schools tied to more than 5,000 drivers later cited for failing English language proficiency checks. Federal law requires commercial drivers to read road signs and communicate in English. (Sign up for Mary Rooke’s weekly newsletter here!)
Another 160 schools were pulled for failing basic training standards, like having no licensed instructors and ghost classrooms that existed mainly on paper. Officials described these schools as self-certified trainers that could not put a student in a truck, run a skills course, or staff the program with licensed instructors. One school, Duffy said, used a bus in a backyard as its classroom.
The schools are being removed from the federal Training Provider Registry. Without that listing, they cannot issue the entry-level driver training certificate required for a CDL. USDOT also said it is warning thousands more providers over noncompliance issues that could result in loss of certification.
The administration’s own scorecard reports that USDOT has removed over 28,000 drivers for failing English-language proficiency checks, forced states to cancel over 30,000 licenses that were illegally issued to foreign drivers, and removed over 8,000 unqualified training schools from the FMCSA registry over the past 18 months.
There have been a string of fatal wrecks that the administration ties to drivers who obtained CDLs they should not have held. One such case happened in August 2025 when Florida Highway Patrol said that Harjinder Singh, an illegal immigrant Indian-born trucker, attempted an illegal U-turn, causing a fatal crash killing three. After the crash, he failed an English and road-sign assessment, answering just 2 of 12 verbal questions correctly and identifying only 1 of 4 road signs. The training company had certified that he could speak English. Singh was charged with three counts of vehicular homicide. Investigators said Singh failed the CDL knowledge exam 10 times and the air-brakes exam twice before obtaining a license in Washington, and later obtained a California CDL.
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USDOT used the crash to audit non-domiciled CDL programs nationwide.
Other cases followed the same pattern where an illegal immigrant obtained a CDL, sparking a national conversation over road safety. President Donald Trump, in his 2026 State of the Union, claimed that there were at least 17 fatal crashes in 2025, killing 30 people, involving illegal immigrants driving with CDLs.
The second item this week is not an emergency order and does not take a single person off a job today. However, it does affect a little-talked-about rule put in place during the Obama administration in 2015 that allows noncitizen spouses of H-1B visa holders to obtain lawful employment in the U.S. DHS recently added a long-term action on the Unified Agenda titled, “Removing H-4 Dependent Spouses From the Classes of Noncitizens Eligible for Employment Authorization.”
Unlike other recent actions, DHS has not published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for this item. Instead, putting it on the Unified Agenda marks the first step in alerting Congress and others that the Trump administration plans to address the issue.
The Obama-era DHS bypassed Congress, which never created a standalone H-4 worker visa, by using its regulatory authority to allow certain H-4 spouses to work in the U.S. The original rationale was that this rule would ease household economics during green-card backlogs, especially for Indian and Chinese nationals. According to the Obama administration, this rule made about 180,000 spouses eligible for employment in the first year alone. United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) data show that tens of thousands of these spouses gain employment approvals each year.
As the national conversation around hiring American workers first continues to dominate the public square, it seems the Trump administration is finally listening. H-1B was always intended as a temporary specialty-occupation visa. But over time it has been used as an on-ramp to employment-based permanent residents. Some of their spouses are legally permitted to work in the U.S. They apply for green cards and even buy homes here. None of these actions support the premise that these visas are temporary in any way. (ROOKE: Big Tech Broke Their Promise, Americans Haven’t Forgotten)
The administration’s theory of the H-4 item seems to be that if the principal visa (H-1B) is temporary, the family should then not be allowed access to a standalone career path that often outlasts the original bargain struck with the intended visa holder. It’s important to note that while ending this eligibility would not deport H-4 spouses, it would stop the issuance of new and renewed work cards. Over time, this would remove the benefit of bringing over entire families if the H-1B visa holder’s salary could not support a family on one income.
The Trump administration seems to be looking at both sides of the immigration debate. Even five years ago, the idea that a Republican administration would be looking to crack down on legal immigration at all was unheard of. Now voters are experiencing a once-in-a-generation overhaul of illegal and legal immigrant workers. If we are lucky, American workers might be embarking on the Golden Era of employment.
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