Just months after two tragic incidents in which illegal immigrants killed pedestrians while operating under Maine driver’s licenses, the taxpayer-funded Maine Immigrants Rights Coalition (MIRC) non-profit submitted a statement opposing federal rules aimed at preventing illegal immigrants from obtaining commercial driver’s licenses.
“As a result of this rule, hundreds of thousands of workers and their families will lose their source of income. Furthermore, the logistics industry will lose a critical component of its workforce amidst a labor shortage. Foreign-born drivers account for nearly one in six U.S. truck drivers, many of whom own small trucking businesses themselves,” said MIRC Advocacy and Policy Manager Ruben Torres.
The MIRC letter came in response to a September rulemaking decision from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), aimed at curtailing the issuance of “non-domiciled” commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs).
Those licenses, which have ended up in the hands of illegal immigrants, are issued to foreigners who do not have their primary residence in the U.S..
“The revisions will help ensure that individuals who do not have lawful immigration status in the United States, and those who do have lawful immigration status but whose status is not directly connected to a legitimate, employment-based reason to hold a CDL, will no longer be eligible to obtain non-domiciled CLPs or CDLs,” said the FMCSA’s rule.
The FMCSA’s rule change was inspired by multiple incidents in which illegal aliens with commercial driver’s licenses caused fatal crashes.
MIRC claimed that the FMCSA was unfairly focusing on a few immigrant-caused crashes and suggested that there is no relationship between the crashes and the drivers’ immigration status.
“Yet these isolated anecdotes do not explain any connection between the drivers’ immigration status and the cause of the crashes, and FMCSA fails to provide any data demonstrating that the selected category of noncitizens is more likely to be involved in fatal crashes,” said the MIRC.
The pro-immigrant group claimed that the changes would significantly harm the U.S. economy because, according to them, one-in-six CDL drivers is foreign-born so the new rules would impact 200,000 drivers.
“The impact of this rule is especially acute in Maine. Portland Adult Education has established a successful CDL training pipeline that produces at least twenty newly trained commercial drivers each year,” said the group.
“These workers, many of whom are immigrants authorized to work in the United States, have helped stabilize local and regional transportation systems by filling vacancies in the public bus system, school bus networks, and municipal transit operations,” they added.
In August, two incidents in Maine demonstrated the danger of illegal immigrants being given drivers’ licenses, though those were not CDLs.
On two consecutive days, two illegal immigrants from Angola struck and killed pedestrians while operating under Maine licenses.
[RELATED: How Do Illegals Wind Up with Maine Drivers Licenses?…]
Since MIRC submitted their complaint, the FMCSA decided to enact the rule in late September, but it has since been placed on hold by a federal ruling in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, pending further review.
MIRC works in a variety of ways to help illegal immigrants, including joining a cadre of other non-profits to establish the Maine ICE Watch hotline, intended to help illegal immigrants evade immigration enforcement officers.
Somali-born State Rep. Deqa Dhalac (D-South Portland) serves as vice president of MIRC’s board. According to their most recent 2024 Form 990 tax filing, the nonprofit received $1,982,237 in taxpayer-funded grants, amounting to more than 50 percent of their total income that year.
