Alex Lockie
ELD tampering has become such a widespread phenomenon that sales agents are cold calling motor carriers offering “ELD editing” and authorities are drafting a new inspections bulletin to combat the “dangerous trend,” according to trucking owner-ops and enforcement communities.
Owner-operator Ilya Denisenko recently got a cold call from a company called AVN Logistics Group. Denisenko said it promised “services such as ELDs, dispatching, oversize permits and e-log editing.”
Contacted by Overdrive about the last of those services, a rep at AVN first said they could add driving time to a driver’s ELD after the driver had run out of hours. Later, however, they insisted the AVN operation was performing strictly legal edits.
Similarly, dispatcher Hector Adrien Esquivel Rodriguez got an unsolicited call from a company called Logbook Hub that advertises on Facebook that it can “FIX your logbook” for $30 a week. Rodriguez posted a video to YouTube that featured him asking this question to the company: “Let’s say I don’t have any more time, I already used my 14 and my 11, and I need to run one more hour. Can you help?”
“Yes, totally,” the voice on the other end of the line responds, saying they have a number drivers can text and a team will edit the logs for them “24/7, no holidays.”
According to Rodriguez, “this company damages the industry, and they are a risk for the people on the road.”
Rodriguez and Denisenko aren’t alone in flagging such out-of-bounds activities. Since the ELD mandate came into play in late 2017, this sort of e-log tampering has grown in prominence so much so that inspectors are contemplating new enforcement mechanisms. The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance of law enforcement and industry stakeholders has seen the uptick, and it’s ready to act.
Jeremy Disbrow, CVSA’s Roadside Inspections Specialist, explained what inspectors are seeing now. “Per the ELD technical specifications, driving time that is detected by the ELD cannot be reassigned to a non-driving duty status,” he said. “Additionally, any edits that are made to the record must show they were edited so the edits are identifiable to safety officials. What inspectors are finding with increased frequency are records of duty status (RODS) that are being completely altered with no indication they were edited at all.”
This has created a problem for inspectors, as instead of showing a one-time lapse in HOS records, these new entirely fabricated ELD reports show wildly divergent activity.
“In many instances, the ELD entries that are shown to inspectors are inaccurate by hundreds or thousands of miles when compared to verified source documents, such as shipping papers, scale receipts, etc.,” said Disbrow. “When entire days or multiple days are completely falsified by manipulating the ELD data, inspectors have no way to identify when the driver was actually driving or resting, making it impossible to determine whether they have their required rest or available driving time.”
As Disbrow noted, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s ELD mandate device specifications in 2017 required that log records can’t be edited without evidence of such editing being left behind in a driver’s record in the device. Yet FMCSA doesn’t actually test the code and hardware for each individual ELD in its device registry, all of which initially self-certified that they follow the rules.
Today, there are more than 1,000 ELD models on FMCSA’s device registry.
The kinds of tampering described above have become become something of an open secret, according to watchers. Disbrow said when inspectors interview drivers about ELD tampering, some common themes emerge. Here’s how he described a typical scenario:
“The motor carrier tells the driver to contact them when they run out of available time to drive,” he said. The motor carrier then “contacts a third party who is able to quickly alter the records to eliminate any violations.” The scenario lines up with what the Logbook Hub rep told Rodriguez.
In some ways, this kind of thing isn’t exactly new. ELD cheating has been around as long as ELDs themselves. Paper logs, too, have long injected a kind of “honor system” into HOS regulations. But this new brand of tampering isn’t any kind of honor system, nor is it like ghost logs, where one driver has two ELDs, one under a fake name to look like a co-driver.
Today’s problem looks to have hit industrial scale, aided and abetted by businesses purpose-built to help motor carriers evade HOS regulations.
“This type of tampering cannot happen unintentionally. It is not a simple error in a record of duty because a driver accidentally made a mistake,” said Disbrow. “This type of tampering is conducted, often by third parties outside of the U.S., on devices that do not meet the technical specifications in the federal regulations.”
These third parties are “completely fabricating the record to show a compliant ELD file without any violations, and in many cases, even falsify electronic supporting documents to match the ELD file,” which gives inspectors real trouble, he said. As of about a year ago, he added, there had been some “isolated reports of inspectors encountering this type of tampering,” yet over the past year, “as inspectors have learned of these techniques, there have been many more instances uncovered across the country.”
CVSA has been passing that information around among inspectors, industry and FMCSA “to help minimize the impact of this dangerous trend,” he said. CVSA’s Driver-Traffic Enforcement Committee “took two important steps to help curtail fatigued driving as a result of ELD tampering.” The first step is the new inspection bulletin “that explains the difference between a typical false entry in a record of duty status, such as a driver claiming off-duty time while fueling their vehicle, and an ELD file that has been manipulated.”
The second was a CVSA committee vote “to add a section to the North American Out of Service Criteria (OOSC) for ELD tampering,” Disbrow added. Currently OOS language for false entries “requires an inspector to prove that the driver would have exceeded the 11, 14, 60 or 70-hour rules at the time of the inspection if the record was not falsified.”
That language “will not change,” but with the dawn of a new era of ELD tampering, “entire days are often manipulated making it impossible for inspectors to determine when actual driving or rest periods occurred,” as noted above. In those instances, “the committee suggested to add an OOS violation to the OOSC which would automatically place the driver OOS until they obtain the required rest.”
The change in the OOSC won’t come quickly, however. CVSA membership will have a final vote on the topic near the end of the year, and the OOSC is annually updated in April. This year, CVSA made the emergency move to add English language proficiency back to the OOSC by June 25, but Disbrow didn’t mention any such effort on the ELD-tampering front. “If it is added to the OOSC, the bulletin,” as is usual, “will be released prior to April 1, 2026, to prepare enforcement and industry for the change,” said Disbrow.
Disbrow acknowledged that some among Overdrive‘s readers “will be concerned about a new OOS condition being added,” but clarified that “this type of tampering will not be a problem for any carriers that are trying to be compliant. This type of tampering is completely intentional and often requires the carrier to pay a third party to ‘scrub’ their logs of any violations.”
FMCSA didn’t respond to questions about what the agency might be doing in response to CVSA’s alerting them to the new trend in ELD tampering, yet FMCSA does semi-regularly remove ELDs from the approved-devices registry. Disbrow said CVSA was “working closely with law enforcement to uncover these tactics and sharing information with FMCSA.”
Disbrow also mentioned something of a “revolving door” problem with the bad actors on ELD registry. “FMCSA maintains the list of approved ELDs that have self-certified,” he said, yet as FMCSA becomes “aware of non-compliant devices, they conduct investigations and revoke these non-compliant devices when appropriate. Unfortunately, some of these companies start over under a new name and the process repeats itself.”
It remains unclear if FMCSA has acted on CVSA-shared information on the tampering issue.
Disbrow concluded with a focus on bedrock safety outcomes, emphasizing that this type of tampering could open carriers and drivers up to major criminal and civil liabilities, particularly in the event a crash.
“While it may be tempting to tamper with an ELD to gain some extra driving time, the violations that may follow are frankly the least of anyone’s concerns,” he said. “The larger issue is the criminal and civil liability that will follow in the event of a collision, not to mention the potential injuries or loss of life from the collision. This trend is nothing short of fraud and false information, and the liability to the motor carrier or driver during a lawsuit or criminal trial is a far bigger concern.”
Alex Lockie
ELD tampering has become such a widespread phenomenon that sales agents are cold calling motor carriers offering “ELD editing” and authorities are drafting a new inspections bulletin to combat the “dangerous trend,” according to trucking owner-ops and enforcement communities.
Owner-operator Ilya Denisenko recently got a cold call from a company called AVN Logistics Group. Denisenko said it promised “services such as ELDs, dispatching, oversize permits and e-log editing.”
Contacted by Overdrive about the last of those services, a rep at AVN first said they could add driving time to a driver’s ELD after the driver had run out of hours. Later, however, they insisted the AVN operation was performing strictly legal edits.
Similarly, dispatcher Hector Adrien Esquivel Rodriguez got an unsolicited call from a company called Logbook Hub that advertises on Facebook that it can “FIX your logbook” for $30 a week. Rodriguez posted a video to YouTube that featured him asking this question to the company: “Let’s say I don’t have any more time, I already used my 14 and my 11, and I need to run one more hour. Can you help?”
“Yes, totally,” the voice on the other end of the line responds, saying they have a number drivers can text and a team will edit the logs for them “24/7, no holidays.”
According to Rodriguez, “this company damages the industry, and they are a risk for the people on the road.”
Rodriguez and Denisenko aren’t alone in flagging such out-of-bounds activities. Since the ELD mandate came into play in late 2017, this sort of e-log tampering has grown in prominence so much so that inspectors are contemplating new enforcement mechanisms. The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance of law enforcement and industry stakeholders has seen the uptick, and it’s ready to act.
Jeremy Disbrow, CVSA’s Roadside Inspections Specialist, explained what inspectors are seeing now. “Per the ELD technical specifications, driving time that is detected by the ELD cannot be reassigned to a non-driving duty status,” he said. “Additionally, any edits that are made to the record must show they were edited so the edits are identifiable to safety officials. What inspectors are finding with increased frequency are records of duty status (RODS) that are being completely altered with no indication they were edited at all.”
This has created a problem for inspectors, as instead of showing a one-time lapse in HOS records, these new entirely fabricated ELD reports show wildly divergent activity.
“In many instances, the ELD entries that are shown to inspectors are inaccurate by hundreds or thousands of miles when compared to verified source documents, such as shipping papers, scale receipts, etc.,” said Disbrow. “When entire days or multiple days are completely falsified by manipulating the ELD data, inspectors have no way to identify when the driver was actually driving or resting, making it impossible to determine whether they have their required rest or available driving time.”
As Disbrow noted, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s ELD mandate device specifications in 2017 required that log records can’t be edited without evidence of such editing being left behind in a driver’s record in the device. Yet FMCSA doesn’t actually test the code and hardware for each individual ELD in its device registry, all of which initially self-certified that they follow the rules.
Today, there are more than 1,000 ELD models on FMCSA’s device registry.
The kinds of tampering described above have become become something of an open secret, according to watchers. Disbrow said when inspectors interview drivers about ELD tampering, some common themes emerge. Here’s how he described a typical scenario:
“The motor carrier tells the driver to contact them when they run out of available time to drive,” he said. The motor carrier then “contacts a third party who is able to quickly alter the records to eliminate any violations.” The scenario lines up with what the Logbook Hub rep told Rodriguez.
In some ways, this kind of thing isn’t exactly new. ELD cheating has been around as long as ELDs themselves. Paper logs, too, have long injected a kind of “honor system” into HOS regulations. But this new brand of tampering isn’t any kind of honor system, nor is it like ghost logs, where one driver has two ELDs, one under a fake name to look like a co-driver.
Today’s problem looks to have hit industrial scale, aided and abetted by businesses purpose-built to help motor carriers evade HOS regulations.
“This type of tampering cannot happen unintentionally. It is not a simple error in a record of duty because a driver accidentally made a mistake,” said Disbrow. “This type of tampering is conducted, often by third parties outside of the U.S., on devices that do not meet the technical specifications in the federal regulations.”
These third parties are “completely fabricating the record to show a compliant ELD file without any violations, and in many cases, even falsify electronic supporting documents to match the ELD file,” which gives inspectors real trouble, he said. As of about a year ago, he added, there had been some “isolated reports of inspectors encountering this type of tampering,” yet over the past year, “as inspectors have learned of these techniques, there have been many more instances uncovered across the country.”
CVSA has been passing that information around among inspectors, industry and FMCSA “to help minimize the impact of this dangerous trend,” he said. CVSA’s Driver-Traffic Enforcement Committee “took two important steps to help curtail fatigued driving as a result of ELD tampering.” The first step is the new inspection bulletin “that explains the difference between a typical false entry in a record of duty status, such as a driver claiming off-duty time while fueling their vehicle, and an ELD file that has been manipulated.”
The second was a CVSA committee vote “to add a section to the North American Out of Service Criteria (OOSC) for ELD tampering,” Disbrow added. Currently OOS language for false entries “requires an inspector to prove that the driver would have exceeded the 11, 14, 60 or 70-hour rules at the time of the inspection if the record was not falsified.”
That language “will not change,” but with the dawn of a new era of ELD tampering, “entire days are often manipulated making it impossible for inspectors to determine when actual driving or rest periods occurred,” as noted above. In those instances, “the committee suggested to add an OOS violation to the OOSC which would automatically place the driver OOS until they obtain the required rest.”
The change in the OOSC won’t come quickly, however. CVSA membership will have a final vote on the topic near the end of the year, and the OOSC is annually updated in April. This year, CVSA made the emergency move to add English language proficiency back to the OOSC by June 25, but Disbrow didn’t mention any such effort on the ELD-tampering front. “If it is added to the OOSC, the bulletin,” as is usual, “will be released prior to April 1, 2026, to prepare enforcement and industry for the change,” said Disbrow.
Disbrow acknowledged that some among Overdrive‘s readers “will be concerned about a new OOS condition being added,” but clarified that “this type of tampering will not be a problem for any carriers that are trying to be compliant. This type of tampering is completely intentional and often requires the carrier to pay a third party to ‘scrub’ their logs of any violations.”
FMCSA didn’t respond to questions about what the agency might be doing in response to CVSA’s alerting them to the new trend in ELD tampering, yet FMCSA does semi-regularly remove ELDs from the approved-devices registry. Disbrow said CVSA was “working closely with law enforcement to uncover these tactics and sharing information with FMCSA.”
Disbrow also mentioned something of a “revolving door” problem with the bad actors on ELD registry. “FMCSA maintains the list of approved ELDs that have self-certified,” he said, yet as FMCSA becomes “aware of non-compliant devices, they conduct investigations and revoke these non-compliant devices when appropriate. Unfortunately, some of these companies start over under a new name and the process repeats itself.”
It remains unclear if FMCSA has acted on CVSA-shared information on the tampering issue.
Disbrow concluded with a focus on bedrock safety outcomes, emphasizing that this type of tampering could open carriers and drivers up to major criminal and civil liabilities, particularly in the event a crash.
“While it may be tempting to tamper with an ELD to gain some extra driving time, the violations that may follow are frankly the least of anyone’s concerns,” he said. “The larger issue is the criminal and civil liability that will follow in the event of a collision, not to mention the potential injuries or loss of life from the collision. This trend is nothing short of fraud and false information, and the liability to the motor carrier or driver during a lawsuit or criminal trial is a far bigger concern.”
My note; Doug Marcello is one of the most distinguished lawyers who works with trucking companies. Carefully consider his advice – my experiences as an expert witness has proven his point many times.
– Joel
Doug Marcello
Every trucking company I talk to has the same fear.
“If we analyze our data too closely, plaintiff attorneys will get it in discovery and use it against us.”
I call this The Discovery Fallacy.
Here is the uncomfortable truth: The data already exists.
Your ELD is generating it. Your cameras are recording it. Your telematics are transmitting it. Every mile, every brake, every speed variance is already documented.
The only question is: Who writes the narrative?
If you do not analyze it, plaintiff attorneys will. And they will not tell your story.
This week I interviewed Hayden Cardiff from Idelic about how machine learning transforms this equation. His company has access to 40 billion miles of driver data and over 500,000 crash records.
His key insight: “It’s not like the machine learning or the predictive analytics is now creating new underlying data. It’s taking the data that’s already existing.”
The carriers winning today are not hiding from their data. They are leveraging machine learning to:
- Identify at-risk drivers before accidents happen
- Document supervision with objective, timestamped evidence
- Prove standard of care against industry benchmarks, not expert speculation
- Create defensible records that flip the script on plaintiff narratives
The Discovery Fallacy costs carriers millions because they let fear drive strategy instead of data.
The data is already there. The only choice is whether you control its narrative.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has finalized a broad array of deregulatory changes affecting vehicle standards, inspection requirements, emergency equipment, licensing rules, and more.
Published February 19, 2026, the rule changes have limited impact but they represent the FMCSA’s first salvo at providing regulatory relief under the Trump administration. More rule changes are expected in the near future.
What’s changing
Motor carriers should review the changes now to determine how they might impact their operations. Except as noted, the new rules take effect on March 23, 2026:
- Bumper labels: Motor carriers will no longer need to ensure that their vehicles’ rear-impact guards have a permanent certification label from the manufacturer. These labels often fall off or become unreadable over time, resulting in citations even when guards meet the safety standard.
- License-plate lamps: Tractors will no longer need a working rear license-plate lamp while pulling a trailer. If there’s no trailer, the light will need to be operational.
- Spare fuses (effective April 20, 2026): Drivers will no longer be required to carry spare fuses for powering required equipment. The FMCSA says today’s vehicles don’t commonly suffer from blown fuses, making the requirement unnecessary.
- eDVIRs: Though already allowed under 49 CFR 390.32, the vehicle inspection rules in Part 396 will explicitly allow drivers and motor carriers to use electronic drivers’ vehicle inspection reports (DVIRs).
- Auxiliary fuel pumps: Motor carriers will be able to use gravity- or siphon-fed auxiliary fuel pumps with tanks up to 5 gallons, mounted on the trailer and used only when the vehicle is not in motion. The rule revises 393.65(d) to reflect modern small-capacity auxiliary systems used for trailer-mounted equipment. capacity auxiliary systems used for trailer-mounted equipment.
- Fuel tank fill limit: It will no longer be a violation to use fuel tanks that can be filled beyond 95 percent of their capacity. Modern liquid-fuel tanks have vented caps that can safely accommodate a 100-percent fill, the FMCSA says.
- Liquid-burning flares: The FMCSA has removed the option to use liquid-burning flares as emergency warning devices. Drivers must use reflective triangles or solid-fuel flares instead.
- CDLs for military techs: Dual-status military technicians (as defined in 10 U.S.C. 10216) are now explicitly included in the commercial driver’s license (CDL) exemption for military vehicle operations. Previously, only National Guard technicians qualified; Air Force Reserve and Army Reserve technicians were excluded.
- Portable conveyors: Portable conveyors used in the aggregate industry and manufactured before 2010 are now exempt from the “brakes on all wheels” requirement, provided certain weight and speed limits are met.
- Tire markings: The FMCSA has clarified that its rules do not require tire load-rating markings on sidewalls. That requirement falls to manufacturers only, not motor carriers.
- Vision waivers: An obsolete grandfathering provision related to an old vision waiver study program has been removed from the regulations (391.64) in favor of today’s alternative vision standard in 391.44.
- Water carriers: The FMCSA has removed outdated references to “water carriers,” updating parts 365, 370, 379, 386, and 390 to reflect the agency’s lack of jurisdiction over maritime carriers.
You can buy a Mexican commercial license online for $200. Six states will convert it to an American CDL without verifying your legal presence. And the federal audit just started.
Rob Carpenter
Somewhere between a Philadelphia apartment and a flea market in South Texas, between a wire transfer to a Mexican fixer and a California DMV counter that doesn’t blink at a birth certificate listing “No Name Given,” the American commercial driver’s license system broke. Not bent. Not stressed. Broke.
It is so broken that a 2025 federal audit found that one in four non-domiciled CDLs issued by California were improper. It broke so badly that Oklahoma state troopers pulled over commercial vehicles driven by individuals whose official government-issued CDLs listed their first name as “No Name Given.” It broke so completely that for $2,500 wired to the right contact in Mexico, a Honduran national who has never sat behind the wheel of a tractor-trailer can receive a digital Licencia Federal de Conductor, a Mexican federal commercial driver’s license, in his email inbox, printed against a backdrop of his garage door, and use it to drive 80,000 pounds of freight on American highways.
This is not a single problem. It is a constellation of failures, federal, state, and international, that have converged into what U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy called “an imminent hazard on America’s roadways” and “a direct threat to the safety of every family on the road.” At least five fatal crashes in the first eight months of 2025 involved non-domiciled CDL holders. In one, a driver attempted an illegal U-turn on the Florida Turnpike in St. Lucie County, killing three Americans. In another, a March crash in Austin involving 17 vehicles killed five people, including two children.
The crashes are the symptom. The disease is a licensing infrastructure so fragmented, so riddled with loopholes and willful state-level negligence, that it has effectively created multiple open doors for unvetted, unqualified, and in many cases undocumented individuals to obtain credentials to operate the deadliest vehicles on American roads. Those doors have names: AB 60, Driver’s Licenses for All, non-domiciled CDLs, reciprocal license recognition, and the newest and perhaps most brazen of them all, the Mexican mail-order CDL.
The $2,500 CDL You Never Have to Earn
The story of the mail-order Mexican CDL begins, ironically, with a modernization effort. In April 2021, Mexico’s Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Transportes began issuing digital versions of the Licencia Federal de Conductor, or LFC. The move was intended to reduce fraud by replacing hard-copy licenses that had long been counterfeited using materials sourced from China, from the same manufacturer, with licenses bearing the same holograms used by the Mexican government. U.S. Customs had been seizing counterfeit materials from cargo ships for years, but had never connected the dots to the downstream implications for American highway safety.
The digital transition didn’t kill the fraud. It supercharged it.
According to Maj. Omar Villarreal of the Texas Highway Patrol’s Commercial Vehicle Enforcement division, the scheme works like this: An aspiring driver, often not a Mexican national but a citizen of Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Colombia, or Venezuela, hears through informal networks that a Mexican CDL is available for purchase. The buyer emails a photograph of themselves, provides basic biographical information, and wires between $2,000 and $5,000, depending on the state where the transaction is facilitated. What arrives is a digital LFC that, when queried through Mexico’s SCT verification portal, may appear legitimate or redirect to a fraudulent clone website that mimics the official system.
Texas enforcement officers began catching these fakes because of the photos. Where legitimate LFC photos would be taken in a Mexican government facility, the digital frauds showed drivers standing in front of garage doors, against residential backdrops, and against living room walls. The backgrounds told the story the documents were designed to hide: these licenses were never issued in Mexico. Many of the holders had never been to Mexico.
“We started noticing in the Austin area an uptick of commercial vehicles engaged in construction,” Villarreal told FreightWaves. That uptick soon gave way to massive encampments forming outside Texas cities, with 80 to 100 commercial vehicles at a time, housing operators working in short-haul construction and aggregate hauling. “We started seeing this crop up all over the major metropolitan areas of Texas.”
When officers interviewed the drivers, many disclosed they were Central American nationals who had acquired their Mexican LFCs without ever setting foot in a testing facility. The digital transition had opened the door to corruption within the Mexican government, which allegedly began selling LFCs to third-party vendors, who then resold them internationally. The result is a fully operational, transnational commercial licensing fraud operation, one that the Biden-era FMCSA and CVSA showed little appetite to address when Texas first raised the alarm.
Cabotage, the Border Zone, and the Legal Fiction
Under NAFTA and now under the USMCA, the United States, Mexico, and Canada agreed to recognize each other’s commercial driver’s licenses for international commerce. A Mexican driver holding a valid LFC can legally deliver international cargo into the United States, but only within designated commercial zones along the southern border or under limited long-haul authority granted to a small number of Mexican carriers following a 2011-2015 congressional pilot program.
The critical restriction is cabotage. Under 49 CFR § 365.501(b) and 19 CFR § 123.14(c), a Mexico-domiciled carrier may not provide point-to-point transportation within the United States for goods other than international cargo. Period. When a Mexican carrier delivers a load into the U.S., it must either find a return load to Mexico or deadhead home. It cannot haul freight from Dallas to Houston. It cannot pick up domestic loads. The regulation exists to protect American trucking jobs and ensure domestic freight moves on domestic credentials.
In theory.
In practice, as the Trucking and Enforcement Action Coalition noted in its 2025 recommendations, “there is nothing to stop drivers authorized for border-zone-only hauling from operating beyond the zone without proper authorization or language proficiency verification.” State law enforcement cannot enforce federal cabotage rules. FMCSA has statutory authority to levy $10,000 civil fines for cabotage violations, but has a longstanding pattern of failing to follow through. The result is a system where the rules exist on paper and evaporate on the highway.
And here is where the mail-order Mexican CDL becomes more than a fraud problem. Under reciprocal recognition, a Mexican LFC, even a fraudulent one, is treated as a valid credential if it appears legitimate. A driver who purchased a digital LFC for $2,500 from a contact in Mexico City can present it to a U.S. motor carrier as proof of qualification. Unless that carrier takes the extraordinary step of verifying the license in Mexico’s SCT database and cross-referencing the CURP, an 18-character personal identification code unique to each Mexican citizen, there is no practical way to distinguish the fraud from the real thing.
Texas tried to close this gap. In 2023, the state legislature unanimously passed SB 672, requiring foreign CDL holders operating outside border counties to possess valid U.S. work authorization documents. The law classified both Mexican and Canadian CDLs as government records, giving prosecutors grounds to charge possession of a fraudulent LFC as tampering with a government record. Enforcement of the new law reduced crashes in Texas. But it also pushed the operators out of state, to Colorado, to Pennsylvania, to California, to Washington, where they found more permissive environments and, in some cases, the opportunity to trade their fraudulent Mexican LFC for a genuine American CDL.
AB 60, Driver’s Licenses for All, and the Gateway to a CLP
California’s Assembly Bill 60, signed into law in 2013 and effective January 2015, allows undocumented immigrants to obtain a California driver’s license without proof of legal presence in the United States. The applicant needs proof of identity, which can include a Mexican passport, a Mexican Federal Electoral Card, or a foreign consular ID, and proof of California residency, which can be established with documents as informal as a cell phone bill, a letter from a nonprofit, or an attestation from a faith-based organization.
More than one million AB 60 licenses have been issued since the program’s inception. The licenses bear the notation “Federal Limits Apply” and cannot be used for federal identification purposes. And critically, AB 60 does not authorize the issuance of a commercial driver’s license. A CDL in California still requires a valid Social Security number.
That is the letter of the law. But the letter and the reality occupy different zip codes.
What AB 60 does provide is a state-issued identity document. It creates a documented residency. It establishes a person in a system. While the license itself cannot be upgraded to a CDL, it provides the bureaucratic foundation on which other credentials can be stacked. An individual with an AB 60 license has passed both the knowledge and driving tests. They have established residency. They have a government-issued photo ID with an address. For someone seeking to navigate the patchwork of state CDL programs, particularly the non-domiciled CDL pathway, that foundation is the first brick in the wall.
The same principle applies in Minnesota, where Governor Tim Walz signed the Driver’s Licenses for All bill in March 2023, effective October 1 of that year. The law removed the requirement to prove legal presence in the United States for a standard Class D license. An estimated 81,000 undocumented immigrants in Minnesota became eligible. The law includes strict privacy protections prohibiting the Minnesota Department of Public Safety from sharing applicant information with federal immigration authorities.
Washington state has followed a similar trajectory. Before the 2025 federal crackdown, Washington was issuing non-domiciled CDLs with what federal auditors later characterized as grossly insufficient verification. In one case identified by the FMCSA, Washington authorized a non-domiciled CDL to a Ukrainian citizen without verifying the individual’s lawful presence in the United States. An internal review discovered that 685 non-domiciled drivers were incorrectly given regular CDLs or learner’s permits rather than limited-term credentials.
The pattern across these states is not identical, but the architecture is the same: create an accessible entry point for a state-issued identity document, build privacy walls that prevent federal immigration authorities from accessing the resulting data, and then fail to adequately police the pathways between that entry-level document and the commercial credentials that allow someone to operate 80,000 pounds of steel at 65 miles per hour.
‘No Name Given’ and the Identity Verification Insanity
In September 2025, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt posted a photograph on X showing a New York state CDL seized during Operation Guardian, a joint operation between the Oklahoma Highway Patrol and ICE along Interstate 40. The CDL listed the driver’s first name as “No Name Given.” The operation resulted in the apprehension of 125 undocumented immigrants from nine countries operating commercial vehicles.
The image detonated on social media. But the reality behind it is both more nuanced and more damning than the viral moment suggested.
In many cultures, Afghanistan, Indonesia, parts of South Asia, and the Middle East, individuals use a single name. There is no surname, no given name, and no family name division. When these individuals present identity documents at an American DMV, the documents may list only one name, with the first-name field left blank or populated with “No Name Given.” California DMV policy requires clerks to transcribe names exactly as they appear on the presented identity documents. If the birth certificate or passport says “No Name Given” in the first-name field, that is what goes on the license.
The policy is defensible in isolation. The problem is what it reveals about the broader system. If a state is issuing CDLs, credentials that under the Real ID Act are supposed to represent some of the most secure identity documents in the nation, credentials that in their REAL ID-compliant form bear a star indicating the holder has been vetted to enter a nuclear facility, to individuals whose identity documents cannot populate a first-name field, the question is not whether mononyms are culturally legitimate. The question is whether the identity verification process actually verifies anything.
Federal auditors apparently concluded it was not. The FMCSA audit that prompted Secretary Duffy’s September 2025 emergency action found that California, Colorado, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, and Washington all exhibited “systemic non-compliance” in their CDL issuance patterns. California alone had 62,000 unexpired non-domiciled CLPs and CDLs in its system. More than 25 percent of those reviewed were improperly issued. Some licenses are extended four years beyond the expiration of the holder’s legal authorization to be in the United States. In one case, California issued a CDL with school bus and passenger bus endorsements to a Brazilian national whose legal presence had already expired.
Pennsylvania, the state that issued the non-domiciled CDL shown in the image at the top of this article, was identified as one of the six states with licensing patterns inconsistent with federal regulations. Over 12,000 active non-domiciled CDLs exist in the Pennsylvania system. FMCSA issued eight mandatory corrective actions to the state, including an immediate pause on all non-domiciled CDL issuance and a full internal audit of every transaction.
Duffy’s Emergency and the Court’s Pause
On September 26, 2025, Secretary Duffy announced an emergency interim final rule that immediately restricted non-domiciled CDL eligibility to holders of H-2A agricultural worker visas, H-2B temporary worker visas, or E-2 treaty investor visas. Employment Authorization Documents alone, the work permits that had previously been sufficient, would no longer qualify. The rule required states to use the USCIS SAVE database to verify every applicant’s immigration status, mandated in-person renewals, and required states to maintain documentation for at least two years.
The rule affected approximately 200,000 active non-domiciled CDL holders and 20,000 CLP holders. FMCSA estimated that only about 6,000 drivers annually would qualify under the new restrictions, a roughly 97 percent reduction in the eligible applicant pool.
“What our team has discovered should disturb and anger every American,” Duffy said. Licenses to operate a massive, 80,000-pound truck are being issued to dangerous foreign drivers, often times illegally. This is a direct threat to the safety of every family on the road, and I won’t stand for it.”
California was given 30 days to comply or face withholding of $160 million in federal highway funds in the first year, with the amount doubling in year two. Washington suspended all non-domiciled CDL processing. Colorado, South Dakota, Oregon, Wisconsin, New Mexico, Georgia, and others followed with pauses of their own.
Then the courts intervened. On November 13, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued a stay pending review, preventing the interim final rule from taking effect until further notice. States were technically free to resume issuing non-domiciled CDLs under the pre-existing regulatory framework. But many did not. California, Washington, Texas, Colorado, South Dakota, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and New York remain subject to corrective action plans that require them to demonstrate compliance with pre-existing federal rules before resuming issuance.
The legal limbo is precisely the kind of environment in which fraud thrives. The rules are unclear. The enforcement is inconsistent. The political pressure cuts in multiple directions. And every day, freight still needs to move.
How the Doors Connect
What makes this crisis so intractable is that each of these problems, the mail-order Mexican CDL, the state license-for-all programs, the non-domiciled CDL pipeline, the “No Name Given” identity gap, and the unenforced cabotage rules, does not exist in isolation. They form an ecosystem.
Consider the path. A Central American national enters the United States without documentation. He establishes residency in California and obtains an AB 60 driver’s license using a consular ID and a cell phone bill. He now has a state-issued photo ID. He obtains a work permit through an asylum claim or other immigration proceeding. He now qualifies for a non-domiciled commercial learner’s permit. He passes the CDL knowledge test, takes a skills test at a third-party testing facility, and obtains a non-domiciled CDL.
Or consider the alternative path. The same individual never enters the formal system. He purchases a Mexican LFC for $2,500 from a contact reached through a WhatsApp group. Because the United States recognizes Mexican CDLs under the USMCA reciprocity agreement, a motor carrier hires him to drive. He operates not within the border commercial zone, but across the interior, because no one enforces cabotage rules. If stopped by state law enforcement, he presents the digital LFC. The officer, without access to Mexico’s SCT verification system or training on how to spot the telltale signs of fraud, the garage-door photo, the mismatched CURP characters, the fabricated verification website, has no mechanism to distinguish the document from a legitimate one.
Or consider the legislative path. In October 2025, Representative Beth Van Duyne of Texas introduced the Protecting America’s Roads Act, which would codify Duffy’s emergency restrictions, end reciprocal recognition of Mexican and Canadian CDLs unless authorized by statute, limit non-citizen CDL terms to the shorter of the I-94 expiration or one year, and authorize 287(g) agencies to report unlawful CDL operators. The Texas Department of Public Safety has separately petitioned FMCSA to amend 49 CFR § 383.23 to remove reciprocal recognition entirely, requiring all foreign CDL holders operating domestically to obtain a non-domiciled CDL with proper work authorization.
These are the right ideas. But they arrive years late and against a backdrop of court stays, state resistance, and the relentless economic pressure of a freight market distorted by the very practices the reforms target. Carriers built on non-domiciled CDL labor, operators who survived the Great Freight Recession by hiring drivers willing to run 1,000 miles in a day, sleep in the truck, accept below-market rates, and ignore hours-of-service rules, are not going to restructure their businesses because of a stayed interim final rule.
Whats Next
The honest answer is that no one knows. The D.C. Circuit stay means the emergency rule is frozen. The corrective action plans for the six identified states create a patchwork of suspended issuance. The Protecting America’s Roads Act has been introduced but not passed. The State Department paused H-2B visa processing for commercial truck drivers in August 2025, further constraining the legal labor pipeline while doing nothing to address the illegal labor market.
Meanwhile, the Mexican mail-order CDL business continues to operate. The digital LFC can be purchased worldwide. The informal networks that connect buyers in American cities to sellers in Mexican government offices, former government offices, or people who have purchased digital infrastructure from government offices are not affected by American regulatory action. They are affected by Mexican law enforcement action, which has been minimal.
What would actually fix this is not complicated in concept, though it is enormously difficult in execution. End reciprocal recognition of foreign CDLs for all domestic operations, full stop. Require every driver operating a commercial vehicle on American roads to hold an American CDL issued through a verified, standardized process that includes SAVE verification, English-language proficiency testing at the point of CDL examination, and biometric identity confirmation. Fund FMCSA enforcement of cabotage rules so that the $10,000 fine authority it already possesses becomes a deterrent rather than a dead letter. Mandate that state DMVs cannot issue any CDL, domiciled or non-domiciled, to an applicant whose identity document cannot populate a legal first and last name through primary source verification. And build a unified federal database of all non-domiciled CDLs with real-time status tracking.
None of this requires new technology. It requires political will, state compliance, international coordination, and the kind of sustained regulatory attention that the trucking industry has been denied for decades, while the aviation industry receives as a matter of course. The FAA does not allow foreign nationals to purchase pilot certificates by mail. It should not be this easy to purchase the credentials to operate a vehicle that weighs more than a loaded school bus.
The license in the photograph that prompted this article, a Pennsylvania non-domiciled CDL, Class A, issued to a foreign national, marked “Limited Term”, is not, by itself, evidence of fraud. It may be entirely legitimate. But it is a symbol of a system that has lost the ability to distinguish the legitimate from the fraudulent, the qualified from the dangerous, and the documented from the disappeared. When a government issues a license to operate an 80,000-pound vehicle to a person whose name it cannot verify, whose work authorization it does not track, and whose driving competence it outsources to a third-party tester it does not audit, it has not issued a license. It has issued a prayer.
On American highways, prayers are not an adequate safety plan.
Scopelitis
From a regulatory standpoint, 2025 was not defined by sweeping new trucking rules but instead by how the federal government chose to act: deregulating selectively, enforcing aggressively, and increasingly using safety as justification for broader objectives.
Those three dynamics explain far more about the year than any single rulemaking — and they set the stage for what carriers should expect in 2026.
Deregulation: Real, but Narrow
The Trump Administration made deregulation an operating principle in 2025 by issuing its 10-1 deregulatory executive order just 10 days into the President’s second term. FMCSA and other regulatory agencies quickly followed suit. In the case of FMCSA, rather than pursuing controversial rollbacks, the agency focused on updating federal regulations to meet the reality of trucking in 2025, potentially reducing administrative burden without reopening core safety debates.
Proposals addressed issues such as the definition of a DOT Accident, electronic documentation, outdated certification requirements, and limited reporting obligations. The relief is targeted and modest. Carriers should view deregulation as margin improvement, not a wholesale shift in compliance expectations.
Enforcement: Where the Pressure Shifted
While rulemaking slowed, enforcement accelerated.
FMCSA significantly increased scrutiny of electronic logging devices, removing nearly 30 ELDs from the registry and rolling out stronger vetting aimed at fraud, white-labeling, and tampered systems. State strike forces reinforced that focus, uncovering widespread manipulation of records of duty status, including the use of ghost drivers and altered logs.
Entry-level driver training enforcement followed the same trajectory. Thousands of training providers were removed from the Training Provider Registry, with many more flagged for noncompliance. CDL mills are now a clear enforcement priority.
The takeaway for carriers is simple: fewer new rules did not mean more tolerance. In many areas, enforcement expectations tightened, laying bare the monumental task of policing the trucking industry’s vendors as well as its motor carriers and the contribution of self-certification regimes to ongoing fraud.
Safety as Justification for Other Objectives
Some of the most disruptive developments of 2025 were framed as safety initiatives but were likely driven by broader policy goals. Restrictions on non-domiciled CDLs and renewed emphasis on English Language Proficiency enforcement were advanced under a safety rationale, while also aligning with a broader immigration enforcement strategy. State responses were uneven, litigation followed quickly, and some issues remain unresolved. This heightened scrutiny is already affecting roadside enforcement, investigations, and driver availability.
What to Expect in 2026
The environment in 2026 is likely to be a continuation of 2025, with potentially higher stakes.
Deregulation will continue, but primarily through narrow, low-risk changes. Carriers should not expect broad relief from core safety and compliance obligations. These deregulatory moves could also make way for some additional regulations under the 10-1 EO. After all, FMCSA has some unfinished business to tend to in the form of its Safety Fitness Determination rulemakings and actions on automated driving, ELD specifications/certification, and automatic emergency braking.
Enforcement will remain the primary policy tool highlighted by greater use of data-driven targeting, technology-enabled inspections, and intensified oversight of ELDs and driver training providers. To this end, CSA reform may come to fruition, and efforts to tie CSA data more directly to carrier safety ratings may continue. At the same time, FMCSA faces a structural reality: regulating a growing industry with limited staff and imperfect data. That reality favors automation, prioritization, and scalable enforcement models.
Finally, the debate will continue on the efficacy of broader immigration related proposals in improving motor carrier safety through reduced crashes.
Bottom Line
For carriers, the lesson from 2025 is clear. Regulatory relief and enforcement pressure are not opposites — they are complementary tools. This year, success will depend less on tracking new rules and more on managing enforcement exposure, data quality, and operational discipline.
