The termination of non-domiciled CDLs has led to another lawsuit. This time, the Sikh Coalition is filing a class-action complaint against the California Department of Motor Vehicles.
Citing the nearly 20,000 California drivers who are slated to lose their CDLs, the Sikh Coalition filed for declaratory and injunctive relief last week in the Superior Court of California for Alameda County.
According to the lawsuit, the California DMV notified more than 17,000 immigrant truck drivers and business owners in November that it would cancel their non-domiciled CDLs on Jan. 5, 2026. The DMV later informed another 2,700 truckers that their non-domiciled CDLs would be canceled in February.
The Sikh Coalition called the cancellation “unlawful” and claimed that CDLs were being canceled over “minor paperwork discrepancies.”
“The state of California must help these 20,000 drivers because, at the end of the day, the clerical errors threatening their livelihoods are of the CA-DMV’s own making,” said Munmeeth Kaur, legal director of the Sikh Coalition. “If the court does not issue a stay, we will see a devastating wave of unemployment that harms individual families, as well as the destabilization of supply chains on which we all rely. These drivers have spent years anchoring their lives to these careers, only to now face potential economic ruin through no fault of their own – they deserve better, and California must do better.”
Although the lawsuit targets the California DMV, the state has often been at odds with the U.S. Department of Transportation over the use of non-domiciled CDLs.
The DOT has been working for months to pull back the non-domiciled CDL process in the United States. In late September, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration issued an emergency interim final rule that would pull non-domiciled CDLs from nearly 200,000 individuals. The agency said the “broken” system allowed thousands of unqualified people to receive CDLs. However, a federal lawsuit has put the rule’s effective date on hold, and FMCSA is now reviewing thousands of comments before it unveils a final rule.
California has argued that its CDL holders are involved in fatal crashes at a rate “far below the national average.” Earlier this month, the California DMV told Land Line that it stood “ready to resume” issuing corrected non-domiciled CDLs to eligible drivers. LL
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