California handed an illegal alien truck driver a commercial license.
He drove drunk into rush-hour traffic on the I-10 and killed three Americans.
But CBP just ran a five-day sweep through Arizona and pulled 95 more illegal alien truckers off the road.
Gavin Newsom Armed Them With Licenses
The Yuma Sector operation ran August 10 through 14.
Multi-agency teams fanned out across Arizona's highways, pulling over commercial trucks at immigration checkpoints.
What they found was not a handful of edge cases.
Ninety-five illegal alien truck drivers hauling 80,000-pound rigs through American communities.
All 95 had state-issued commercial driver's licenses.
Seventy-six came from California.
Six came from New York.
https://twitter.com/GuntherEagleman/status/2094439165903478855?s=20
California – the state that spent months calling Sean Duffy a liar when he said they were handing out licenses to illegal aliens – just had 76 of its licenses pulled from the cabs of truckers who had no legal right to be in this country.
Agents also stopped two active human-smuggling operations during the same sweep.
Four smugglers were arrested.
Seventeen smuggled aliens were pulled out of hidden compartments.
Seventy-four pounds of methamphetamine was seized.
One hundred sixty-nine pounds of marijuana was taken off the road.
In total: 143 arrests from 18 countries.
Acting Chief Patrol Agent Dustin Caudle put it plainly: "We are committed to protecting our citizens from all international threats, whether that is from unlicensed or untrained drivers, or transnational criminal organizations engaged in human or drug trafficking."
Yuma Already Caught a Homicide Suspect Behind the Wheel This Year
This is the third major Yuma Sector trucking operation in 2026 alone.
In February, agents arrested 11 illegal Indian nationals behind the wheels of commercial trucks.
In May, Operation Checkmate netted 36 illegal alien truckers in five days – including one man wanted for homicide in his home country who had been driving a big rig on American highways.
The pattern is clear.
Blue-state CDL programs became the cartel's HR department.
https://twitter.com/BrandonFalco121/status/2094444886376267886?s=20
California's Assembly Bill 60 – signed in 2013, effective 2015 – opened the door.
It let undocumented immigrants obtain a California driver's license without proof of legal presence in the United States.
From there, the pipeline ran straight to a commercial learner's permit.
A federal audit found that over 25 percent of California's non-domiciled commercial licenses were improperly issued – with expiration dates that outlasted the driver's legal right to be in the country.
California DMV workers were caught issuing 216 fraudulent CDLs.
Nearly 3,000 training providers were shut down for falsifying records.
And when Duffy called them out, Gavin Newsom's office called him a liar.
Then the audit dropped.
Seventeen thousand illegally issued California CDLs revoked.
"After weeks of claiming they did nothing wrong, Gavin Newsom and California have been caught red-handed," Duffy said.
California got slapped with $160 million in withheld federal highway funds as a consequence.
Sean Duffy Is Done Playing Games
The Trump administration is not waiting for California to clean up its mess.
FMCSA's new rule – finalized February 13, 2026, effective March 16 – ended the CDL free-for-all.
Only H-2A, H-2B, and E-2 visa holders can now obtain a commercial driver's license.
Employment Authorization Documents – the loosely issued work permits that acted as the golden ticket into a truck cab – are finished as CDL credentials.
Every applicant now gets verified through the SAVE federal database before a single state issues a single license.
"Moving forward, unqualified foreign drivers will be unable to get a license to operate an 80,000-pound big rig," Duffy said.
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As of May 2026, FMCSA had already revoked more than 28,000 illegally issued CDLs nationwide and pulled over 20,000 non-English-proficient drivers out of service.
The Yuma bust happened after all of that.
Which means cartels were still running the pipeline even as Trump's team dismantled it piece by piece.
The operation confirms what conservatives already knew: California didn't stumble into this – they deliberately handed illegal aliens the credentials, and the cartels used every inch of that decision.
The question is never whether Trump was right about this.
He was always right.
The question is how many more 80,000-pound rigs were rolling down your highway before agents in Arizona spent five days and got 95 of them off the road.
Sources:
- Leo Briceno, "Dozens of illegal alien truck drivers busted with licenses from deep blue states," Fox News, August 31, 2026.
- Dustin Caudle, Acting Chief Patrol Agent statement, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, August 31, 2026.
- "DOT Non-Domiciled CDL Rule," BMD LLC, March 11, 2026.
- "FMCSA New Rule Cracks Down on Non-Citizen Commercial Driver's Licenses," Jackson Lewis, February 18, 2026.
- "36 Illegal Alien Commercial Truck Drivers Busted in Yuma Border Patrol Sector in 5 Days," Breitbart, June 15, 2026.
- Karoline Leavitt statement on California CDL and fatal DUI crash, Fox News, October 2025.
- "California Cancels 17,000 CDLs Following Federal Audit," FreightWaves, November 12, 2025.