OAN Staff Katherine Mosack
9:52 AM – Friday, December 26, 2025
The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) is facing a lawsuit from nearly 20,000 migrants over the state’s plan to revoke their commercial driver’s licenses.
The Asian Law Caucus and the Sikh Coalition, along with the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP filed the class action lawsuit on Tuesday in the Superior Court of California. The lawsuit is working to prevent the California DMV from canceling non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs).
“This class action lawsuit is brought on behalf of the Jakara Movement and five commercial drivers who have been deprived of their rights and livelihoods,” the groups said in a statement.
The groups argue that this planned cancellation would “result in mass work stoppages beginning January 5, 2026.”
In November and December, the DMV sent out 60-day cancellation notices to over 17,000 immigrant drivers whose expiration dates on state driver’s licenses and federal work authorization records did not match.
“According to reports from the San Francisco Chronicle and KQED, California state officials communicated they would begin reissuing licenses on December 17. Despite these public assurances, the state has neither reissued any of the contested licenses nor created a process to remedy the date issue with no indication that it plans to do so before January 5th,” the statement said.
The filing requires the DMV to set a CDL expiration date for an immigrant driver on the same day as, or earlier than, the expiration date of the driver’s work authorization or legal presence documents, without interrupting their driving privileges.
The groups also argue that “Freight truckers, transit drivers, and other drivers have for years provided invaluable services, including delivering goods and produce, hauling municipal waste, and transporting neighbors and children to jobs and school.”
The statement further claims that the California drivers represented by the suit “comply with a host of federal and state regulations, including regular renewals of their licenses and work authorization allowed under immigration law.”
“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. 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,” said Munmeeth Kaur, legal director of the Sikh Coalition.
“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.”
The suit follows a dispute in November in which the Department of Transportation (DOT) said that California had illegally issued the licenses.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy emphasized that Governor Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) was “caught red-handed” by an audit the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) carried out, which revealed that more than 25% of CDL records sampled in the state failed to comply with federal law.
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