Update, September 17, 2026: Judge Trenga has now granted a preliminary injunction. The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) is barred from handing the roughly 17 million CDL records to DOT or the Department of Homeland Security, and federal agencies cannot cut funding or contracts to pressure AAMVA or the states while the case continues. The court found the states likely to win on the merits. Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, who leads the coalition, says the litigation will continue.
In the latest clash over who really controls the data that could save lives on the road, a federal judge has slammed the brakes on the Trump administration’s bid to review records for 17 million commercial driver’s license holders. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s Department of Transportation wants those files to root out unsafe and, in some cases, illegal drivers behind the wheels of 80,000-pound rigs. Twenty-one states and the District of Columbia sued DOT to keep the information locked away, and a coalition of 22 states and D.C. filed a matching suit against the Department of Homeland Security, which is on hold while the DOT case proceeds.
The request went to AAMVA, the nonprofit that runs the nationwide Commercial Driver’s License Information System (CDLIS). DOT lawyers argued the records are not “state data” at all. They sit with AAMVA on the federal government’s behalf, they said, and the agency has both the statutory duty and the urgent need to examine them after a string of fatal crashes involving non-domiciled truckers and concerns about fraud at CDL schools. When AAMVA hesitated, officials reissued a subpoena and warned they could pull $10 million in federal funding that supports the very system they want to inspect.
Senior U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga of the Eastern District of Virginia, a George W. Bush appointee who has ruled against the administration more than a dozen times since 2025, sided with the states. He first issued a temporary restraining order in August, declaring that while AAMVA physically holds the files, the data is “owned by the states.” On September 17 he converted it into a preliminary injunction, which keeps the review frozen until the case is decided.
The states claim turning over the records would violate privacy promises they made to drivers, erode public trust, and scare people away from applying for commercial licenses. DOT counters that the judge wrongly treated a safety initiative as a pretext for immigration enforcement and ignored the agency’s core mission of keeping highways from becoming killing fields.
The timing is grim. In the days before the ruling, an illegal immigrant from India was involved in a head-on crash that killed an Ohio woman, and another non-domiciled CDL holder apparently caused a fatal incident on a New York highway while backing up. These incidents follow earlier deaths that Duffy cited when he launched the nationwide cleanup. The same week the injunction came down, a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. heard arguments over FMCSA’s separate rule tightening non-domiciled CDLs.
The same states now blocking federal access once shared motor-vehicle and voter data with private groups before the 2020 election. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin recently flagged that those transfers, some involving Social Security and driver’s-license numbers, may have been improper. The contrast is hard to miss: data flowed freely when it served one political purpose, yet is now treated as inviolable when the federal government wants it for safety.
Whether Judge Trenga’s order stands or falls on appeal, the underlying question remains: who gets to decide if the next 80,000-pound truck rolling down an American highway is driven by someone who should never have received a commercial license in the first place? The files exist. The crashes keep happening. The court fight will decide how soon anyone in Washington is allowed to look.
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