Let’s meet someone. His name doesn’t matter, as he asked us not to use it, but his life does. He won an award as 2023 Driver of the Year. He recently bought his first home. His wife is expecting their second child.
He has done everything right by every measure this country claims to value. And in November 2025, he received a letter from the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) telling him his commercial driver’s license (CDL) was being canceled.
He had done nothing wrong.
That sentence drove the Jakara Movement to put its name on a class-action lawsuit in December 2025. What happened to him happened to roughly 20,000 drivers across this state, many of them Fresno-based Punjabi Sikh men who built careers and families around the steering wheel of a truck.
These are people who have been the backbone of California’s freight and transportation economy for decades, who paid their taxes, raised their children in this state, and asked nothing more than to be treated fairly under the law they followed. They are our fathers, our uncles, our aunts, our brothers. They are us.
What Actually Happened
Beginning in April 2025, President Trump signed a number of executive orders to change standards for commercial drivers. Many of us raised immediate concerns about racial and religious profiling that could soon follow. In California in the 1990s, we had seen this playbook before—the abuse of laws in order to racially profile residents.
In August, an FMCSA (Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration) audit found California had been issuing CDLs with expiration dates that didn’t match some drivers’ work permit dates, as required by state regulation, a clerical error baked into the DMV’s own processes.
The mistake belonged entirely to the California DMV. Drivers showed up, passed their tests, paid their fees, and drove legally. They had no way of knowing of the DMV’s internal processes.
In September, the Trump Regime’s Department of Transportation threatened to pull $150 million in highway funding unless California addressed the discrepancies, despite there being no federal law requiring the dates to match.
By November, cancellation notices began arriving, letters just before Thanksgiving, livelihoods ending at the new year. The drivers include a bus driver caring for a severely disabled child, a tow truck owner whose wife is expecting and a school bus driver facing a 50% pay cut. These are not statistics. These are our neighbors.
On Dec. 22, the Jakara Movement, represented by the Asian Law Caucus, Sikh Coalition and Weil, Gotshal & Manges, filed a class-action lawsuit against the California DMV. These were mass terminations of livelihood rooted in the state’s own errors, carried out without hearings, without appeals and without any lawful path for drivers to correct the record.
A Win in Court but Still Lost the Clock
On March 2, the Jakara Movement won in Alameda Superior Court. The judge ruled that canceled drivers were entitled under California law to immediately reapply. It was a vindication with the court seeing what we had been saying all along.
But winning on the merits and winning on timing are two different things. The cancellations were set for March 6. The DMV will not act on the ruling, pointing to the FMCSA’s federal hold. Four days was not enough runway.
Thirteen thousand licenses were canceled on schedule, even as the Jakara Movement stood with a court ruling in hand. The Jakara Movement will continue to advocate, in and out of court, for justice for these drivers.
On March 16, a new FMCSA Final Rule took effect nationally, barring asylum seekers and refugees, the very people who built California’s trucking industry after fleeing the 1984 Sikh Genocide in Punjab and India, from qualifying for CDLs.
Drivers from Mexico, El Salvador, Laos, Thailand and Ukraine have joined the coalition. The Jakara Movement, the Sikh Coalition and the Asian Law Caucus have joined with others to fight this rule, and it is hoped that a court will act soon to lift its restriction.
This is not a Punjabi Sikh story. It is a story about who gets to belong in this country and who gets scapegoated when politicians need a villain.
A Case Built on Lies
The Trump administration needed a narrative and found one in a handful of fatal crashes: a Wyoming tunnel collision, a Florida highway crash, and incidents in California and Ontario. Each was a horrible tragedy for families and survivors alike, but instead of care and compassion, they were weaponized as proof of a systemic threat from foreign-born drivers.
Through July 2025, roughly 1,600 fatal truck crashes were reported nationwide. Those cited incidents represent a fraction of a percent of that total. The administration offered no data showing foreign-born drivers are overrepresented in crashes.
Federal agencies don’t even track crash rates by immigration status. This crackdown was built on political narrative, not evidence.
Two lies have circulated long enough to pass for fact. Both are false.
Lie one: These drivers don’t speak English. Federal law requires every CDL holder to read and speak English sufficiently to understand highway signs, respond to law enforcement and complete required logbooks, and every one of these drivers meets that standard every single working day.
These drivers read highway signs, fill out federal logbooks and respond to law enforcement in English every day. What is new is using that requirement as a tool of public humiliation, pulling drivers over for roadside language tests never applied to white, native-born drivers.
Immigrants with brown or Black skin, or a turban, made people a target. The English proficiency has always been there. The targeting is what is new.
Lie two: These drivers are undocumented. Federal law has long permitted foreign nationals with valid employment authorization to obtain non-domiciled CDLs. These drivers were here on the exact authorizations the law recognizes.
California made a data entry error and issued licenses with wrong expiration dates. The drivers had no way of knowing. Calling them “illegal” is not analysis; it is a smear designed to make sure no one asks who actually made the mistake. It is the oldest political trick in the book: when the government fails, blame the people the government harmed.
This Is Not Over
Punjabi Sikh drivers represent an important part of California’s commercial trucking workforce. They built truck stops, driving schools and freight corridors. They drove the school buses and refrigerated trucks that kept this state functioning through every supply chain crisis of the last decade.
They are woven into the infrastructure of daily life in the Central Valley and far beyond. Immigrant drivers and all truckers keep America moving.
The Jakara Movement exists for moments exactly like this, when bureaucratic failure and political cowardice combine to destroy innocent people, and when manufactured narratives are used to make sure no one looks too closely.
The Jakara Movement will keep organizing. It will keep telling the truth. And it will keep showing up for the 13,000 people whose licenses were taken from them while they had done nothing wrong.
The state made the error. The federal government weaponized it. Two lies are being used to cover for both. And 13,000 people who did everything right are paying the price.
Their licenses were canceled. This fight is not over.
