Year After Deadly Crash, 21 Blue States Move to Block Trump Commercial Driver’s License Data Request

Democrat attorneys general have sued to block the Trump administration from accessing records on commercial driver’s licenses.

The Trump Department of Transportation has stepped up enforcement of commercial driver’s licensing rules, seeking more information from states to find unqualified truck drivers, including illegal immigrants. It has threatened to withhold about $10 million in funding if states don’t hand over the records.

However, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul led a group of 21 Democrat-leaning states and the District of Columbia in filing two lawsuits in the Eastern District of Virginia, just over a year after an illegal immigrant truck driver caused a Florida Turnpike collision that killed three people.

“Yet again, the Trump administration has threatened to hold federal funding hostage in order to obtain personally identifiable information of millions of Americans for improper purposes,” Raoul said.

“This database was created 40 years ago so states could share information with each other to stop unsafe drivers from operating commercial vehicles, and the federal government’s decision to ransack that database puts the whole system in jeopardy,” he added. “I will continue to push back on the unnecessary and unlawful attempts of the Trump administration to misuse Americans’ most personal information.”

The state’s commercial licensing data is stored centrally with the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, an organization that represents state DMV officials. The federal agencies gave the association a deadline of Aug. 17 to share the information; when the association said it could not meet the deadline, the Department of Homeland Security subpoenaed the records.

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The Department of Transportation contends the association operates the commercial driver’s license database under a federal government contract.

“Every administration since 1988 has had access to this basic database, so let’s be clear on what this ridiculous lawsuit is really all about,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a statement.

“These radical state AGs want to make it harder for my Department to enforce the rules of the road and easier for dangerous illegal immigrant truck drivers to operate a big rig,” Duffy added. “They may not care about keeping you and your family safe, but President [Donald] Trump and I do. We will fight this lawsuit tooth and nail to prevent more senseless crashes by unqualified drivers.”

Since Trump signed an executive order to restore integrity to the trucking industry in April 2025, the Department of Transportation says it has revoked 30,000 illegally issued commercial driver’s licenses across noncompliant states. It also removed about 10,000 fraudulent or unqualified commercial driver’s license training providers from the federal registry.

Both lawsuits name the Department of Transportation and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration as defendants. The second also names the Department of Homeland Security.

The lawsuits claim the agencies are violating multiple federal privacy laws by secretly setting up their own database, and further claim the demand for data violates the Administrative Procedure Act.

The complaint says that, to approve a commercial driver’s license application, states validate the driver’s identity, medical fitness, immigration status, and each applicant’s licensing and driving history in any state where the driver could have been licensed. When a license is issued, states maintain a record of each driver that includes personally identifiable information such as the driver’s name, date of birth, Social Security number, driver’s license number, and the name of the state that provided the record.

Joining Illinois in the lawsuit are Democrat attorneys general from Virginia, California, the District of Columbia, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin. In Pennsylvania, which has a Republican attorney general, the governor’s office joined the lawsuit.