DOJ shuts down nearly 300 truck-driving schools in 23 states amid fraud investigation
Nearly 300 commercial truck-driving training schools across the United States are receiving orders on Monday to shut down operations as a federal agency coalition works to address fraud in the commercial driver's license business.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, and Justice Department officials hosted a press conference Monday morning at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Detroit to speak on an interagency effort to address and prevent fraud in the trucking industry.
Duffy said this interagency, interstate enforcement sends a message to those who seek CDLs by fraudulent means or help others obtain one by fraudulent means.
"Cut up your commercial driver's license and find something else to do," Duffy said. "Get off the road."
Other officials attending included FTC Chairman and White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud Vice Chairman Andrew Ferguson; U.S. Attorneys Jerome Gorgon (Eastern District of Michigan) and Adam Mildred (Northern District of Indiana); and U.S. Attorneys from Ohio and Illinois.
In addition, Marcus Coleman and his daughter Dalilah, who was injured in a traffic crash in 2024 involving a commercial truck, represented families who have been harmed by unsafe driving on the nation's highways by individuals who should not have been licensed. Duffy said Coleman spent three months in a coma and suffered a catastrophic brain injury.
"By the grace of God, she is with us today," he said.
The Trump administration's goals include supporting the U.S. trucking industry by recruiting military veterans. The administration also aims to prevent drivers with safety-related violations in other countries from obtaining U.S. commercial driver licenses.
Monday's announcement of the Joint Task Force Crossroads of America follows a string of fatal crashes involving noncitizen truck drivers — including a 2025 Fort Pierce, Florida, crash that killed three people, after CBS Miami reported the driver had failed his CDL written exam ten times before eventually being licensed in Washington state. Federal and state officials have since moved to tighten CDL rules, including license cancellations in California and a temporary State Department pause on commercial driver visas.
The actions detailed by the task force include an emergency removal of 110 commercial driver's license schools that have been associated with more than 5,000 drivers who have failed English language proficiency tests, along with a synchronized sweep targeting more than 200 training schools in 23 states. The Trump administration says 160 additional schools were not qualified to train truck drivers.
The scenario that Duffy and Mullin explained involves commercial driving licenses issued to people who have not been properly trained or licensed to drive a big truck. In some cases, truck-driving instructors did not have a CDL themselves. In other cases, such training schools operated without actual classroom space or an appropriate training site for operating an 18-wheel vehicle. The officials also said there were incidents they investigated where the truck driver involved could not speak or read English.
"These schools are passing off these CDLs to people who haven't earned them," Ferguson said.
"We pick them up all over the country," Duffy said.
Gorgon said this task force focuses on the Midwest because of heavy commercial traffic on interstates and cross-border connections with Canada.
The scenario also affects the U.S. truck-driving industry as a whole, Gorgon said.
"These drivers squeeze American truckers out of the marketplace with low wages ... and often they're up to something much worse," Gorgon said, referring to drug trafficking investigations.
"We want well-skilled, well-trained truck drivers on American roads," Duffy said. "And if you're not well-skilled, you're not well-trained, and you're not well-licensed, you have no place driving an 18-wheeler, 80,000 pounds on American roadways."
