Saying that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s non-domiciled CDL rule “threatens to destroy the livelihoods” of tens of thousands of truck drivers, attorneys are asking the court to expedite the case.

FMCSA’s non-domiciled CDL rule, which took effect on March 16, aimed to take about 200,000 CDL holders off the road. Under the rule, an Employment Authorization Document is no longer enough to obtain a non-domiciled CDL. Additionally, asylum seekers, asylees, refugees and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients are ineligible.

Jorge Rivera Lujan, a DACA recipient who has been in the U.S. since he was 2 years old and a truck driver for the past 11 years, argues that the rule’s decision to revoke his CDL is not rooted in safety.

Attorneys for Rivera Lujan are awaiting a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on their motion to stay the rule. Additionally, the plaintiffs filed a motion on March 23, asking the court to expedite the case and set a briefing schedule.

“In addition to harming petitioners, the rule will harm the serious economic reliance interest of the 200,000 drivers now forced to exit the market, who have invested substantial time and resources in their driving career,” the plaintiffs wrote. “The record shows that assuming CDLs come for renewal at a consistent rate, approximately 8,000 non-domiciled CDLs will come up for renewal every month and … will not be renewable, leading to continuous ongoing losses.”

The Public Citizen Litigation Group called the non-domiciled CDL rule “arbitrary,” saying it is not rooted in safety.

During a House hearing earlier this month, Public Citizen attorney Wendy Liu testified that the U.S. Department of Transportation has no data showing that non-citizens cause more crashes than U.S. citizens.

The FMCSA contends that the rule is critical to highway safety because thousands of drivers were issued non-domiciled CDLs without proper vetting.

“Petitioners’ contrary arguments rest primarily on a misunderstanding of the rule’s rationale,” attorneys for FMCSA wrote in a response to the court filed on March 16. “The rule does not assert that there is a direct link between immigration status and a driver’s ability to safely operate a commercial motor vehicle … Instead, the salient point is that state licensing authorities do not (and cannot) assess with the same degree of confidence a non-domiciled applicant’s safety because individuals domiciled outside a given state but seeking a CDL – a category almost entirely comprised of non-domiciled aliens – tend to have driving histories outside the reach of U.S. state-level agencies. It is well within the agency’s regulatory ambit to decide that credentialing individuals whose driving history is largely or entirely unknown does not provide an appropriate margin of safety, at least absent alternative vetting measures like those available to non-domiciliaries who remain eligible for CDLs.”

The plaintiffs pushed back, arguing that “all CDL drivers, however – citizens and non-citizens alike – must satisfy the same requirements and complete the same training and testing.” LL