Court could toss FMCSA's non-domiciled CDL ban 'any day' — visa loophole under fire

A federal appeals court could decide "any day now" whether to throw out FMCSA's non-domiciled CDL ban — and the judges' sharpest questions in oral arguments before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit were about the rule's exemption for visa holders.

FMCSA's ban shuts down almost all CDL eligibility for non-citizens except holders of a few classes of non-immigrant visas: H-2A, H-2B, and E-2. Challengers argue that carve-out makes the rule "arbitrary and capricious." The agency's defense is that visa applicants go through "enhanced consular vetting and interagency screening" by the State Department — a functional proxy, it says, for the driver-history vetting that state licensing agencies can't do. But in court, FMCSA's lawyer wasn't able to describe specifically how the agency knew all visa applicants would have their driving records properly vetted.

One judge pressed the point with a hypothetical: for E-2 applicants, who must come from a U.S. treaty country and invest at least $100,000 in a business here, why would a State Department consular employee care about the applicant's driving record — and since the applicant's employees would also get CDL eligibility, couldn't an investor from a treaty ally simply buy a truck and get a group of drivers approved?

Overdrive's state-level reporting found the ban's effects are uneven. North Dakota resumed issuing non-domiciled CDLs to visa holders on April 13 and has since issued 267 of them — 264 Class A — more than its prior average of about 264 a year. Arizona, by contrast, has issued just 34 to customers with temporary immigration presence since the March ban, down from 6,103 non-domiciled CDLs in force in mid-2025. Pennsylvania, one of 28 states placed under special orders to stop issuing non-domiciled CDLs even to visa holders, has issued zero since March — though FMCSA's own audit of the state found only two paperwork violations in 150 sampled records, and the state says FMCSA hasn't written back.

Why it matters

This is the biggest regulatory question hanging over the driver market right now: if the ban falls, the rules for foreign-driver CDLs get rewritten overnight. Watch for the D.C. Circuit decision — Overdrive says it could come "any day" — and if you run international drivers, know exactly which visa classes your state still accepts.