During a hearing on Monday, the Texas House Committee on Transportation examined the issue of commercial driver’s licenses ( CDLs ) held by nondomiciled drivers and whether said operators are to blame for an increase in traffic crashes.
One of the charges that Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows (R-Lubbock ) made during the interim for lawmakers to consider before the upcoming legislative session has become a focal point for transportation leaders under President Donald Trump’s administration: holding CDLs by foreigners.
For working vehicles such as semi-trucks, 18-wheelers, buses, or dump trucks, drivers with a total vehicle weight rating of more than 26, 000 pounds, those that are designed to have 16 or more passengers, and those that transport hazardous materials that need placarding.
After the U.S. Department of Transportation changed its emergency rule, Texas ended its release of CDLs to some noncitizens in September 2025, citing” a disturbing series of fatal accidents caused by non-domiciled CDL holders.”
After previously offering CDL and permit exams in both English and Spanish, the Texas Department of Public Safety ( DPS) announced in June that it would only now offer them in English. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration ( FMCSA ) had announced that it had received a notification that CDLs and CLPs would be issued once more to Temporary Agricultural Workers or H-2A visa holders that same month.
The Transportation Committee’s discussion on Monday requested that politicians “evaluate the presence of non-domiciled buyers operating in Texas, including whether their presence coincides with an increase in traffic situations.”
You had people from all over the globe who illegally found a way to make a living driving a corporate vehicle in the United States. There were unfit individuals. As the first tool see to address the matter, DPS Major Omar Villareal argued that they had “put public safety in danger.”
After Mexico’s move to issuing digital CDLs in April 2021, which he believed “opened the door for this type of scam,” he described what he called a “high level of fraud that was being propagated in the Mexican government.”
The driver would communicate with a contact in the Mexican authorities, wire money over, and be immediately given a modern Mexican license, according to Villareal. We started seeing an upward tendency in these driver-related professional car accidents.
He suggested that legislation that was previously passed by the Texas Legislature and requiring truck drivers with a Licencia Federal de Conductor ( LFC), Mexico’s national CDL, to work in the state “improved the topic quite a bit, but we’ve also seen that in living.” Villal continued, noting that the Mexican LFC was created solely for federal banking.
” These vehicles are here in Texas, working for American companies and undermining American labour,” they claim. They are unqualified individuals, he said,” and they’re putting the public in danger.”
Additionally, John Esparza, president of the Texas Trucking Association ( TXTA ), testified before the committee and stated that his organization” supports vigorous enforcement of English language proficiency requirements and significant reforms governing non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses.”
What happens on our Texas highways and in our state frequently dominates border scheme, and conversely, what we do regarding business driver qualifications has effects far beyond our state,” he continued.
” The significance of renewed enforcement is already apparent. TXTA now thinks that we should fix the issue before the driver crosses the road, not after a law enforcement official discovers it during a roadside inspection.”
When state representative Christina Morales (D-Houston ) questioned the panelists about the problem and questioned whether” this panel is ] trying to say that people from other countries are worse drivers than the ones here in the United States,” there was a bit of backlash.
Esparza refuted that definition, arguing that drivers are most frequently discovered as being unlawfully present in the nation after a federal inspection when a commercial vehicle is stopped. He explained that these drivers, who may be operating legally with a Mexican LFC but are in the country illegally, are being paid much less than American citizens and are thus undermining American jobs.
State Rep. Terry Canales (D-Edinburg ), the former chair of the Transportation Committee, addressed the panelists,” Just to clarify, no one here is against foreign drivers. We oppose foreign drivers who obtain their licenses inadvertently. which the panelists all said yes.
The majority of witnesses voted in favor of further revisions of the requirements for CDL issuance and maintenance in order to prevent problems on the roads brought on by a lack of language proficiency after the fact, as well as support for the Trump administration’s efforts to address the issue.
The Texas Senate will also examine nondomiciled CDL holders in its own Transportation Committee hearing on August 25 as the two chambers work to better understand the subject and decide what legislation should be filed in response. With the 90th Legislative Session quickly approaching in January.
