Advocacy groups have filed a class action lawsuit to challenge the California Department of Motor Vehicles’ decision to cancel commercial driver’s licenses held by around 20,000 immigrants in the state.
The Sikh Coalition, a national group that advocates for the Sikh community, the civil rights organization Asian Law Caucus, and the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP filed the suit on behalf of the Sikh cultural organization Jakara Movement and five anonymous commercial drivers.
The California DMV wants to revoke the licenses because they bear expiration dates that do not coincide with the holders’ immigration documentation dates, rendering them invalid. The lawsuit alleges that, as the issuing authority, the California DMV is responsible for this discrepancy and that the impacted drivers will lose their livelihood even though they are not at fault.
In November, an audit by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration found that more than 17,000 commercial licenses issued to immigrants in California had expiration dates that extended beyond the duration of their legal presence in the country, which goes against the California DMV’s own law. In October, the U.S. Department of Transportation threatened to withhold $160 million in federal funding to California unless the state revokes the licenses.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy in a news release dated Nov. 12. “My team will continue to force California to prove they have removed every illegal immigrant from behind the wheel of semitrucks and school buses.”
Nearly 20,000 licenses set to expire
Since November, the California DMV has sent cancellation notices to around 20,000 immigrant commercial drivers, according to the lawsuit that was filed Tuesday. If the cancellations are allowed to stand, more than 17,000 immigrants will lose their licenses on Jan. 5, and 2,700 more on Feb. 13.
According to the California Vehicle Code, in case of licenses with incorrect expiration dates, the DMV is supposed to either cancel the licenses without prejudice and allow impacted license holders to reapply. The lawsuit filed Tuesday alleges that the DMV is not allowing impacted immigrants to reapply and that it has not provided any timeline for when they will be able to do so. As a result, the impacted immigrants are staring at a loss of livelihood.
Many of the 20,000 impacted drivers are Sikhs. According to the North American Punjabi Trucking Association, about a quarter of Sikhs living in the United States work in the trucking industry. Bay Area cities like Fremont, Livermore, Hayward, Union City, and El Sobrante have sizeable Sikh populations, which will be impacted.
Munmeeth Kaur Soni, Legal Director at the Sikh Coalition, said that the drivers acted in accordance with federal and state law and that there is no question that the discrepancy in expiration dates was a result of a DMV systems error.
“What they’re trying to do is penalize these 20,000 drivers who committed no wrongdoing,” said Soni. “After giving them (California DMV) multiple opportunities to correct this, we’ve been left with no option but to file the lawsuit because of the imminency of the Jan. 5 termination date.”
This is not the first time that Sikh commercial drivers have been swept up under the federal government’s anti-immigration crackdown.
In April, President Trump signed an executive order to establish new English proficiency standards for truck drivers. In May, the Sikh Coalition wrote a letter to the Department of Transportation, raising questions about how English proficiency will be defined and calling for safeguards against the profiling of Sikhs.
“To be clear, the Sikh Coalition is not opposed to common sense safety reforms — including the obvious fact that all truckers must have basic English language skills to drive safely in the United States,” said Mannirmal Kaur, Sikh Coalition Senior Federal Policy Manager, in a news release at the time. “We are committed, however, to working to ensure that any new rules resulting from this order do not disproportionately or discriminatorily impact Sikh and Punjabi truckers.”