California lawmakers spent much of this year wrestling with a thorny question: could the state safely hand over driver’s license data to a national clearinghouse — as the federal government was demanding — without exposing more than a million people to immigration enforcement and other law enforcement agencies?
In the end, worried that state-issued IDs might stop being accepted at airports and federal buildings, legislators voted this summer to let the Department of Motor Vehicles move forward with sharing driver data.
What they didn’t know at the time was that the Trump administration was already pressing the same national nonprofit for records on millions of drivers — and planned to use that information for immigration enforcement.
This summer, federal agencies demanded, and later subpoenaed, sweeping data on commercial drivers from the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, the nonprofit that serves as a data-sharing hub for state motor vehicle departments across the country. It’s the same organization California intends to entrust with all of its driver records starting next year.
Those federal demands came to light only last month, when 22 state attorneys general — including California’s — sued to block the government from enforcing a subpoena for the driver records.
Now, critics of California’s data-sharing plan say their warnings were justified, and they’re calling on the state to hit pause. At stake is a broader debate over how much privacy and protection California can realistically promise nearly 30 million licensed drivers.
“AAMVA’s handling of these commercial driver’s license records gives California good reason not to trust that it will safeguard the far larger set of noncommercial license records the DMV plans to upload next year,” said Ed Hasbrouck of the civil liberties group the Identity Project.
Hasbrouck and other privacy and immigrant-rights advocates say AAMVA took weeks to notify California and other member states about the federal demands — and, at first, was prepared to comply and hand the information over in bulk.
AAMVA spokesperson Claire Jeffrey declined to answer questions about the federal demands but said the organization “is working through the difficult circumstances of the data request and ongoing litigation” and “remains committed to working with all stakeholders to address the competing concerns in this matter.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office, which backed the data-sharing legislation, has dismissed concerns about the situation as overblown — much as it did earlier this year when critics warned that any California data sent to AAMVA could eventually be swept up in a federal subpoena.
Tapping state licenses for a federal crackdown
The Trump administration’s push for license data appears tied to a broader crackdown on noncitizen commercial truck drivers. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration began strictly enforcing English proficiency requirements in May 2025, and in February 2026 finalized a rule barring immigrants with legal work authorization — including asylum seekers, Temporary Protected Status holders and DACA recipients — from obtaining commercial driver’s licenses.
According to court records and an Aug. 11 subpoena from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to AAMVA, federal officials sought data on 17 million commercial license holders, citing “civil immigration law enforcement” as the purpose. The request covered names, birth dates, states of residence, license numbers and Social Security numbers for every driver in AAMVA’s commercial license database over the past five years.
The subpoena also directed the nonprofit not to disclose its existence “for an indefinite period of time,” arguing that doing so would “impede the investigation” and interfere with federal law enforcement.
Court filings show the federal government first approached AAMVA on June 25 seeking the commercial license data. Citing “conflicting legal obligations” between state and federal governments, AAMVA initially agreed to hand over the information — prompting state officials to threaten legal action, arguing that doing so would violate agreements with state motor vehicle departments as well as state and federal privacy laws.
California has long shared commercial license data with AAMVA. Under the plan lawmakers funded in June, the DMV intends to begin uploading records for all California license holders, including noncommercial licenses — a group that includes more than a million immigrants who obtained licenses under a 2013 state law allowing undocumented residents to drive legally. Lawmakers funded the plan after DMV officials and the governor’s office warned that withholding the data could put California out of compliance with the 2005 REAL ID Act, potentially rendering state-issued IDs unusable at airports and federal facilities.
According to a sworn declaration from Kristin Triepke, who heads the license policy division at the California DMV, the department only learned of the federal government’s request to AAMVA for commercial license data on July 23 — when AAMVA’s executive director emailed the group’s board. That was 10 days after Newsom signed the bill authorizing the data-sharing arrangement. AAMVA had signed an agreement with California’s DMV last year promising not to share commercial driver data without written authorization.
In her declaration, Triepke warned that handing driver data over to federal authorities could push more noncitizens to drive without a license altogether — creating what she called serious public safety risks.
In an apparent effort to placate California and other member states, AAMVA had proposed letting individual state motor vehicle departments decide whether to share commercial license data in bulk with the federal government, according to a court filing. That proposal triggered threats from the Trump administration that the U.S. Department of Transportation would pull grants and cancel contracts with AAMVA, and DHS responded by issuing the subpoena, arguing it was entitled to data on all commercial license holders regardless of state consent.
On Aug. 21, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia temporarily blocked AAMVA from complying with the request, calling it unlawful. Judge Anthony Trenga is scheduled to hear arguments Sept. 10 on whether to issue a preliminary injunction permanently barring AAMVA from releasing the data.
The outcome of that legal fight could have significant implications for whether states can actually protect driver data once it’s shared with a national database.
Newsom’s office isn’t convinced there’s cause for alarm.
Are Californians at risk?
Earlier this spring, the governor’s communications team accused CalMatters reporters of “fear-mongering with lies” for covering concerns about the data-sharing plan, including the possibility that federal officials could obtain the information through a subpoena. Asked about the subsequently revealed federal subpoena for shared license data, a spokesperson stressed differences between the commercial driver data the Trump administration recently sought and the broader set of driver records lawmakers agreed to share with AAMVA — even though both datasets are housed by the same organization.
“These are separate systems governed by different rules, purposes, and legal authorities,” said Diana Crofts-Pelayo, a Newsom spokesperson. “The federal government’s demand in this case involves bulk access to [commercial license] data, not the individual searches federal officials already conduct, and California has not provided the bulk data requested.”
Crofts-Pelayo noted that commercial drivers already submit Social Security numbers for verification through federal databases as part of the licensing process. A key argument against California sharing noncommercial license data is that missing or provisional Social Security numbers in that pool could be used by federal authorities to identify drivers for immigration enforcement purposes.
Still, immigrant and privacy advocates say the state’s drivers remain at risk under the planned data-sharing arrangement.
Saira Hussain, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy nonprofit, said the subpoena confirms earlier warnings and argued the DMV should delay its plans to share driver information.
“AAMVA’s response was completely inadequate — it took them a full month to even tell states about the subpoena, and they were prepared to comply with it,” she said.
Crofts-Pelayo did not answer directly when asked whether the state would delay sharing noncommercial driver data with AAMVA while the litigation plays out.
The DMV said it cannot weigh in on the legal merits of the DHS subpoena but that the department “takes very seriously its responsibility to protect the personal information of Californians.”
“California has opposed the bulk disclosure of commercial driver information,” said Eva Spiegel, deputy director of public affairs for the DMV.
A DHS spokesperson, who asked not to be named, told CalMatters in an email: “It is extremely dangerous to have illegal aliens, who often don’t know our traffic laws or even English, driving vehicles on American roads. We are confident we will win this important case in court.”
Advocates say the federal government’s data demands are exactly what they warned about before the Legislature voted in June to fund the license data-sharing plan.
“We take no pleasure in saying, ‘We told you so,'” Hasbrouck said. “But in this case, we did tell you so.”
Original source: CalMatters
