Federal law in 49 CFR section 391.11 requires truck drivers to “read and speak the English language sufficiently to converse with the general public, to understand highway traffic signs and signals in the English language, to respond to official inquiries and to make entries on reports and records.”
Now President Trump has signed an Executive Order (https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/enforcing-commonsense-rules-of-the-road-for-americas-truck-drivers/), reinstating the active enforcement of this English proficiency requirement for truck drivers, first adopted in 1970. No longer will the use of interpreters, cue cards or phone apps suffice to communicate with law enforcement. After all, those interpretation supports are not usable while actually driving a truck. The Executive Order directly rescinds a 2016 memorandum from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, once again making the absence of English proficiency an out-of-service (OOS) violation.
Why now? After all, the United States, Canada and Mexico entered the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 (updated as the USMCA in 2020) to facilitate international trade between the three countries. Most of that international trade travels by commercial truck. But recent years have shown an influx into the U.S. of foreign truck drivers with fraudulent Mexican CDLs, including persons from Cuba, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Columbia and Venezuela, who illicitly purchased their licenses. Some did not have basic training in the operation of a truck (https://www.prepassalliance.org/fraudulent-mexican-cdls-proliferate/). Several U.S. states have reported fatal crashes involving these drivers.
Safety begins with knowing and understanding the rules of the road. Those rules can differ from country to country. Proficiency in the native language helps that learning process. But even more immediately, a truck driver needs to understand and appropriately respond to emergency situations, to directions from law enforcement, and to road closures and traffic alerts, all while safely operating the truck. There is no time available for language reference materials when safety is at stake.