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.
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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.
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.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/08/14/year-after-deadly-crash-21-blue-states-move-to-block-trump-commercial-drivers-license-data-request/