A federal judge has temporarily blocked the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration from obtaining the full Commercial Driver License Information System database, which holds records on about 17 million drivers.
Senior US District Judge Anthony J. Trenga of the Eastern District of Virginia granted the order last Thursday to 21 states and the District of Columbia. FMCSA had demanded that the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators hand over the name, date of birth, state of record, licence number and Social Security number for every driver in the system going back five years. The order also blocks the agency from cutting more than $10 million in federal funding to AAMVA if it refuses.
Congress created CDLIS in 1986 so states could share information about commercial licence applicants, and DOT has contracted with AAMVA, a private nonprofit, to run it since 1988. The agencies said they wanted the records to investigate illegal practices at driving schools, identify fraud in licences issued to people in the country illegally, and conduct immigration enforcement.
Trenga pointed to the agency’s own policy, which he said “explicitly states that the records in CDLIS are not controlled by FMCSA,” and found that the records belong to the states. He held that the demand was final agency action, which gave the court jurisdiction. He then concluded the states are likely to succeed on claims that the demand violates the Commercial Motor Vehicle Safety Act, runs contrary to the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act and the Privacy Act, is arbitrary and capricious, and breaches the Spending Clause.
Trenga wrote that FMCSA “has provided no confidentiality assurances and openly admits that it intends to share the records with DHS so that it can be used for immigration enforcement, among other things.” He added that the agency had been unable to explain how the sensitive personal information would help it police licence integrity, a claim he said was hard to square with FMCSA meeting its statutory obligations for decades without it.
The states must file any motion for a preliminary injunction by August 27, with the government response due September 3 and a hearing set for September 10. A related suit against the Department of Homeland Security over the same records, which Minnesota also joined, is on hold pending the DOT case.
Federal access to state-held driver data has drawn scrutiny before, when a TSA official told a House hearing the agency helps ICE check passenger data. A separate biometric case over driver records is running in Illinois, where a judge this month certified a class of about 22,000 drivers against Union Pacific.
Sources: Overdrive, Vermont Attorney General
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
