Indian Punjabi truckers sue California DMV for revoking their licenses
Immigrant truck drivers sued the California Department of Motor Vehicles over the revocation of thousands of drivers’ commercial driver’s licenses, claiming the decision violated their rights and threatened their livelihoods.
The DMV in California issued a 60-day revocation notice to 17,000 drivers on Nov. 6 after a federal audit found that licenses issued to immigrant drivers would expire after the amount of time they were legally allowed to remain in the United States.
If the DMV makes such clerical errors, the lawsuit argues, California law requires the DMV to voluntarily change the expiration date or allow applicants to reapply for a corrected license.
“The state of California should help these 20,000 drivers because at the end of the day, the clerical errors that threaten their livelihoods are CA-DMV’s own doing,” said Munmeeth Kaur, legal director of the Sikh Coalition, a group fighting for the civil rights of Sikhs.
The Sikh Coalition and the Asian Law Group filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of five commercial driver’s license holders, challenging the DMV’s decision to revoke the licenses.
The number of cancellation notices has increased since November grown It rose to over 20,000.
“If the court does not grant a stay, we will see a devastating wave of unemployment hurting individual families, as well as the destabilization of the supply chains we all rely on,” Kaur said.
The Sikh Coalition also noted that the action was taken under pressure from the federal government. It was stated that the California DMV was unable to process the application and the applicants were informed that it did not issue or renew non-resident commercial driver’s licenses.
Sikh truckers from Punjab have emerged as a pillar of the American trucking industry. For years, many people have sought refuge in the United States and entered the transportation industry.
There are approximately 750,000 Punjabi Sikhs in the United States. About 150,000 of them work in the trucking industry, with the majority located on the West Coast.
The issue of immigrant truckers became a political flashpoint earlier this year when a Sikh driver from Punjab made an illegal U-turn on a toll highway, causing a crash in Florida that killed three people. The Trump administration took action and found this: seven states, California, including Washington and Texas, had lax licensing rules.
The crackdown has sparked a wave of racism and racial profiling of Sikh truckers, many of whom wear turbans and beards as symbols of their faith, which is neither Hindu nor Muslim.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy accused California of issuing commercial driver’s licenses to unskilled immigrant truckers whose department puts lives at risk on the road. Many truckers left the industry following the introduction of enhanced English proficiency tests in which highway inspectors check language proficiency and highway traffic sign proficiency.
Policy changes regarding non-citizen commercial licenses and enforcement of English language proficiency could remove more than 400,000 commercial drivers from the market over the next three years, according to JB Hunt, one of the largest trucking companies.
