The state Senate held a committee hearing this week on Pennsylvania’s commercial driver’s license process, a month after the system became the controversy du jour with the Trump administration.
Despite the political rhetoric that erupted in November, the hearing was far less dramatic and pointed to several cases where bureaucratic inertia appeared to be the root cause of truck drivers hitting the road with dubious credentials.
On Nov. 9, U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement said it arrested a man from Uzbekistan in Kansas who was wanted in his home country on terrorism charges. The man, identified as Akhror Bozorov, was a commercial truck driver with a Pennsylvania CDL issued in July 2025, according to ICE.
Bozorov’s license was a “non-domiciled” CDL, issued to individuals who are not U.S. citizens or permanent residents, and which is subject to certain extra federal interstate commerce rules.
NEW: DHS confirms to @FoxNews that ICE has arrested an Uzbeki illegal alien wanted alleged terrorist who was driving an 18-wheeler in Kansas and had been given a CDL by the state of Pennsylvania. 31-year-old Akhror Bozorov has had an arrest warrant in Uzbekistan since 2022 for… pic.twitter.com/OVmVqO3kMi
— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) November 17, 2025
President Donald Trump’s administration immediately attacked Gov. Josh Shapiro, saying the governor and former President Joe Biden had allowed “terrorist illegal aliens” to drive 18-wheelers on American highways. Conservative media framed the arrest similarly, with Fox News saying the matter was a “fiasco” and “scandal” for Democrats. The U.S. Department of Transportation sent a letter to PennDOT threatening to cut Pennsylvania’s highway funding over alleged licensing lapses.
At Tuesday’s hearing before the Senate Transportation Committee, however, PennDOT Secretary Mike Carroll placed the issue squarely on a “lack of attention to detail” by federal agencies.
Although federal regulations don’t require it, Carroll said PennDOT retains copies of non-domiciled CDL applicants’ immigration documents, and also vets that information with the federal Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Verification for Alien Entitlements (SAVE) database.
Bozorov “was run through the SAVE system in July by PennDOT. The Department of Homeland Security greenlit, gave us approval to issue the license,” Carroll said.
Further, Carroll testified that PennDOT re-ran the query after news of the arrest broke — and that Bozorov still showed as being cleared to work as a commercial truck driver.
“Not only did we check with the Department of Homeland Security in July, we re-checked when the story broke as the result of the stop in Kansas, and interestingly, he was still greenlit to receive a CDL despite his interface with the ICE folks,” Carroll said.
“So that says these agencies are not talking. They are not communicating,” observed Transportation Committee Chair Sen. Judy Ward, R-Blair County.
Bozorov, according to ICE, had been detained after illegally entering the country in 2023, but was released inside the U.S. and was able to obtain a work visa in 2024.
“I rely on our federal partners in the Department of Homeland Security to have an updated system,” Carroll said. If ICE didn’t want Bozorov on the road due to his alleged terror ties or his 2023 illegal entry, but this wasn’t reflected on the SAVE database, then there’s not much PennDOT can do, Carroll said.
Starting in 1986, the federal government began enacting interstate commerce rules regarding CDLs, creating universal standards for truckers’ qualifications. This appears to have created some mutual finger-pointing between the feds and the states, with the latter putting the onus on the former to create regulations, and the former saying the latter should be doing those same things proactively.
In August, following several high-profile crashes involving non-domiciled CDL holders, the Trump administration ordered a halt to new work visas for immigrant truck drivers. In September, the U.S. DOT published new regulations on how states are to check non-domiciled CDL drivers’ work authorizations.
Those regulations were stayed by a federal court due to a lawsuit, but PennDOT paused issuing new non-domiciled CDLs pending further developments, Carroll said.
In the November letter to PennDOT, the U.S. Department of Transportation asserted that states should already have been ensuring that the expiration dates on non-domiciled CDLs don’t exceed the driver’s immigration authorization. This interpretation, however, was not spelled out until the September revision that is still in legal limbo, according to the Federal Register.
In a random audit of 150 non-domiciled Pennsylvania CDLs done in September, the U.S. DOT said, it found two cases in which a driver’s CDL was valid even after their immigration status expired. In two other cases, according to the letter, PennDOT’s data entry “did not provide evidence” of verification of driver documents.
The commonwealth has between 10,000 and 11,000 active non-domiciled CDLs, Carroll said. The obvious question, said Sen. Wayne Langerholc, R-Cambria County, is “could you provide verification that every one of those 11,000 is here in this state lawfully?”
Carroll answered affirmatively, although he cautioned that “I am not going to testify to 100% perfection,” given that PennDOT staff must manually review and enter proof of immigration status, and mistakes can occur.
U.S. DOT’s attempt to retroactively interpret the rules on CDL expirations is also complicated by the fact that work visas often include automatic extensions. The Trump administration has moved to end such extensions on new visas — but only did so in October, long after the CDLs in question had already been issued.
“There are cases where the immigration documentation with an EAD (employment authorization document) will have an automatic extension on it, so what you see on the actual [CDL] product may be different than the actual length of stay,” said PennDOT Deputy Secretary Kara Templeton.
Tuesday’s hearing also included testimony from trucking industry representatives, who said they’re continuing to feel the crunch of increasing demand for shipping and a decreasing pool of experienced drivers, a problem that was rapidly accelerated by the covid-19 pandemic.
Non-domiciled CDL holders are often filling the gap, but “inconsistent federal guidance has produced inconsistent state practices” when it comes to the licensing of immigrants with temporary work visas, said Rebecca Oyler, president and CEO of the PA Motor Truck Association.
The recent controversy caused PITT OHIO to review all of its employees’ non-domiciled CDLs and work authorizations, said Jeff Mercadante, the trucking firm’s Chief Safety & Risk Officer. Three drivers out of roughly 1,900 were found to have immigration papers that expired before their CDL, according to Mercadante.
Even if that specific issue is relatively uncommon, senators and industry members said, the past few weeks of discussion have stirred up broader concerns about the proliferation of fly-by-night trucking schools that are clearing individuals whose driving abilities are dubious.
Several testifiers blamed a 2022 move by the federal government to create Entry-Level Driver Training (ELDT) standards for CDL schools, which states must honor. While intended to create consistency for driver training, the regulation created a massive loophole, in which schools are able to register on the ELDT list even if they don’t meet state oversight rules.
“As a result, Pennsylvania has two parallel training environments: a high-quality, licensed CDL school environment overseen by the Pennsylvania Department of Education, and an unlicensed, unregulated ELDT provider list that self-certifies to the federal government and may offer minimal hands-on training,” Oyler said.
The state has limited ability to stem this, with Pennsylvania Department of Education officials testifying that it can take up to 18 months for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) to act on state complaints about sketchy ELDT schools.
There does seem to be some recognition, Carroll said Tuesday, that the real cause of issues with trucker safety is less about states’ immigration enforcement and more about the lack of federal action against schools that are putting questionable drivers on the road, citizens and immigrants alike.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the FMCSA, just last Friday, deleted 3,000 schools” from the ELDT registry, Carroll said.