Texas DPS does what it can. Texas Law wrote the loopholes.
DPS troopers testified Monday about the mail-order Mexican CDLs they've been catching since 2021. The statute that tells DPS not to test English is still on the books. I35 trucks are full of people.
Maj. Omar Villarreal of the Texas Highway Patrol’s Commercial Vehicle Enforcement division sat before the Texas House Transportation Committee on Monday and told lawmakers what his troopers have been documenting since 2021: digital Mexican federal commercial licenses, the Licencia Federal de Conductor, sold by wire transfer to buyers who never set foot in a Mexican testing facility, followed by a rise in commercial vehicle crashes involving the drivers who hold them. None of that testimony was new. Villarreal said the same things to FreightWaves in February, garage-door photos and all, and I printed them. What was new was the room. The committee taking that testimony is an arm of the same legislature that has kept a statute on the books since 1995 directing that same department not to examine any CDL applicant’s English, and permitting it to hand a non-English speaker a commercial license restricted to Texas roads instead. Monday’s session produced no bill and no timeline beyond the next session, which begins in January. The troopers testified. The elected officials listened. Then everybody went home, and the trucks kept rolling up I-35.
Texas enforcement isn’t the problem, and the inspection ledger proves it. Texas law is the problem, and the people who write Texas law spent Monday nodding along while an agency described a crisis the statute book helped create.
What the agency actually did
In 2021, Mexico’s Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Transportes went digital with the LFC, and the counterfeit market went digital with it. Texas troopers were the first in the country to catch it, and they caught it with their eyes: legitimate LFC photos are taken in a Mexican government facility, and the fakes showed drivers posed in front of garage doors and living room walls. When officers interviewed the drivers, many turned out to be Honduran, Guatemalan, Cuban, or Venezuelan nationals who’d wired between $2,000 and $5,000 to a contact and received a license in their inbox. Villarreal’s division watched encampments of 80 to 100 commercial vehicles form outside Texas metros, running short-haul construction and aggregate. DPS raised the alarm with FMCSA and CVSA years ago and got shrugs.
The legislature’s one good answer came in 2023. SB 672 passed unanimously, requiring foreign CDL holders operating outside border counties to carry valid U.S. work authorization and classifying Mexican and Canadian licenses as government records so a fraudulent LFC could be charged with tampering. DPS and the trucking industry both told the committee Monday that the law worked, cutting the number of unqualified drivers on Texas roads. It also worked like water: operators flowed to Colorado, Pennsylvania, California, and Washington, where nobody was checking. Texas DPS then went further than any state agency in America and petitioned FMCSA to amend 49 CFR § 383.23, the reciprocal recognition rule, so that every foreign license holder operating domestically would need a non-domiciled CDL with proper work authorization. That petition is a state police agency asking the federal government to close a door its own legislature never touched.
The enforcement volume backs the posture. I published the state-by-state MCSAP ledger last month, every federal inspection dollar against every inspection performed, and Texas runs the second biggest roadside program in the country: 362,655 inspections in fiscal 2025, behind only the California Highway Patrol. Texas writes more paper per stop than any state: 2.34 violations per inspection, and 90 percent of it is vehicle maintenance. Whatever you want to say about Austin, the men and women at the scales are working. This June, DPS moved all CDL and CLP knowledge exams to English only, banned interpreters from the testing room, and said troopers will keep evaluating English proficiency at roadside and at the weigh stations. Federal officials told the committee that roughly 26,000 drivers nationally came off the road in the past year for failing the English standard, and about 30,000 licenses were canceled as illegally issued. The agency side of the ledger, state and federal, is full.
The statute
Texas Transportation Code § 522.043(b) says the department may not administer examinations or tests relating to an applicant’s English proficiency, and that if an applicant can’t speak enough English to communicate his need for a commercial license to the counter clerk, the department may issue him a CDL restricted to intrastate commerce. In plain terms, state law forbids the licensing agency from checking whether a commercial driver can read a road sign, then permits it to license him anyway, so long as he keeps his 80,000 pounds inside Texas. The 74th Legislature enacted the section in 1995, and it’s still current law in August 2026, three decades later. Nobody on the dais proposed repealing it on Monday.
Federal law runs the other direction. 49 CFR § 391.11(b)(2) has required English proficiency of CMV drivers for decades, and since June 25, 2025, a driver who fails the standard at roadside goes out of service on the spot. The federal grant program that funds the Texas inspection operation, the Motor Carrier Safety Assistance Program, conditions the money on the state adopting rules compatible with federal ones, and 49 CFR § 350.305 lists the variances a state may keep. English proficiency isn’t on the list. When I asked DPS leadership in June 2025, the agency confirmed it has no FMCSA-approved exemption for the intrastate carve-out. Texas has been operating a statutory exception the federal rules don’t recognize, funded by a federal grant that assumes the exception doesn’t exist, and FMCSA turned a blind eye to the arrangement for years.
The workaround came from the governor’s office, not the legislature. In September 2025, Gov. Greg Abbott ordered DPS to enforce English proficiency for all commercial drivers on Texas roads, including intrastate licenses, and by this June the department had been directed to stop issuing new intrastate commercial licenses to drivers who can’t communicate in English. Whether an executive order and an agency testing policy can lawfully override a statute that says “the department may not” is a question for a court, and I won’t answer it here. What I can say is what the statute book says, and the statute book still says what it said in 1995. A trooper parking a driver under the federal out-of-service criteria is enforcing one sovereign’s rule against a license the other sovereign’s statute commanded his own agency to issue. The two commands can’t both stand; only one building in Austin has the power to reconcile them, and on Monday that building held an informational session.
I-35 is where the paper meets the road
The border, we’re told, is closed. The freight lanes aren’t, and the same trucks this whole fight is about are the smuggling infrastructure. On May 18 of this year, a DPS trooper stopped a tractor-trailer near mile marker 28 on I-35 north of Laredo. The driver jumped out and ran. Inside the sleeper berth, troopers found 20 people packed shoulder to shoulder, four of them minors, most from Mexico and Guatemala. The tractor wore the forged logos of a legitimate carrier that had nothing to do with it, the same identity mechanics I write about every week in the chameleon world, applied to human cargo instead of freight. Sgt. Erick Estrada of DPS described the tell that started the stop: the truck was maneuvering to avoid the Border Patrol checkpoint. “Anytime we see a commercial vehicle circumventing the checkpoint, we stop the truck tractor,” Estrada said, and inside that one were twenty human beings.
The checkpoint itself catches what tries to come straight through. On July 16, Border Patrol agents at the I-35 checkpoint pulled eight people out of another sleeper berth; the driver, a U.S. citizen, is facing federal smuggling charges under 8 U.S.C. § 1324. In April 2025, agents ran a tractor-trailer through the checkpoint’s Multi-Energy Portal scanner and found five more. Estrada told reporters the volume climbs in the summer months, with cartel-connected organizations recruiting drivers for the runs. Laredo is the busiest land port in the country, with thousands of tractor-trailers a day, and a sleeper berth is the one compartment on the highway that law enforcement almost never opens. A fraudulent driver hides behind the CDL. The cargo hides behind the curtain. Same truck.
The corridor also runs on a rule nobody enforces. A Mexico-domiciled carrier delivering international freight into the U.S. may not haul point-to-point loads inside the country, what the regulations call cabotage, under 49 CFR § 365.501(b) and 19 CFR § 123.14(c). State troopers have no authority to enforce it, FMCSA holds $10,000 civil fine authority it has historically declined to use, and the industry told the committee Monday exactly where that leads: foreign licenses issued for cross-border commerce being used for hauls that never touch the border. The Texas Trucking Association’s John Esparza put the frame where it belongs, telling lawmakers the question is “whether the individual can safely perform that job” behind 80,000 pounds. Rep. Christina Morales of Houston pushed back that the scrutiny lands on people for holding a Mexican credential rather than for anything they’ve done, and that concern deserves an answer better than a shrug. The answer is verification. A system that can confirm a license is real, and that its holder earned it, protects the legitimate cross-border driver more than anyone, because he’s the one currently competing against a $2,500 email attachment.
The crash that hangs over it all happened on this same interstate, at the other end of the corridor. Solomun Weldekeal-Araya was driving the 18-wheeler in the North Austin pileup that killed five people, including two children. He faces 22 charges, five of them manslaughter counts, and those are allegations a jury hasn’t heard yet. Federal investigators have already found an issuance failure: DPS personnel concluded his refugee status and work authorization qualified him for a standard Texas CDL when the rules called for a non-domiciled credential. The counter clerk’s error is the whole system in miniature. The statute told the department language doesn’t matter for the intrastate driver, the federal rules told it something else, and a licensing workforce caught between the two put the wrong card in a man’s hand.
The measuring stick bent too
Every federal crash record carries a checkbox for whether the driver held a valid license, and for thirteen straight quarters, Texas-licensed drivers in crashes were coded unlicensed less than one percent of the time. In spring 2025, the moment the federal crackdown began, the figure jumped to 2 percent, then 30 percent, then 79 percent by late summer, with four out of five Texas drivers in crashes flagged as unlicensed. In January 2026, it snapped back to 0.3 percent. The actual crash count never moved, roughly 4,700 Texas-driver crash records a quarter of the time. Texas drivers didn’t lose their licenses en masse last summer and find them by New Year’s. Somebody changed how the box got checked, in one direction when the heat came on and back again when the calendar turned. Any elected official waving a 2025 unlicensed-driver statistic at a hearing, in either direction, is waving a number that measured the political weather.
The legislature convenes in January, and members will reach for statistics to justify whatever they were already going to do. The statistics from the crackdown year are contaminated by the crackdown itself. The statute isn’t. It says what it says, in black letter, and repealing § 522.043(b), ending foreign-license intrastate operations the way the industry asked Monday, and backing the DPS petition on § 383.23 all sit fully within the power of the people who held the hearing. None of it requires anything from Washington.
DPS asked the federal government to close the reciprocity door. Troopers are pulling twenty people at a time out of sleeper berths at mile marker 28. The counter clerks are caught between a statute and an order that contradict each other. Every actor in the agency did something this year. The one institution with the pen didn’t, and it gave itself until January. Between now and then, the trucks keep coming up from Laredo, and the statute book in Austin still promises a commercial license to a driver who can’t tell the clerk what he’s there for.