This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
California lawmakers wrestled with a difficult question earlier this summer: Could the state safely share driver’s license data with a national group, as the federal government demanded, without exposing more than a million people to immigration and law enforcement agencies?
Ultimately, amid fears that state IDs wouldn’t be accepted at airports and federal buildings, they voted to let the DMV share driver data.
What they didn’t know was that the Trump administration was already demanding access to information about millions of drivers from the national nonprofit and planning to use the data it obtained for immigration enforcement.
This summer, federal agencies first requested, then subpoenaed, bulk commercial driver data from the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, or AAMVA, a nonprofit that acts as a clearinghouse for information from state motor vehicle departments nationwide. That’s the same organization California plans to entrust with all its driver records by next year.
Those demands became public last month through a lawsuit in which 22 state attorneys general, including California, sued to block the federal government from carrying out a subpoena seeking driver records.
Now opponents of California’s driver data sharing are saying “We told you so” and calling on the state to delay and reconsider its plans. Hanging in the balance are hotly-debated questions about how much privacy, sanctuary and utility the state can offer its nearly 30 million license holders.
“AAMVA’s behavior with respect to these commercial driver’s licenses gives California compelling reasons not to trust AAMVA to safeguard the much larger number of non-commercial driver’s license records that the DMV plans to upload to AAMVA next year,” said Ed Hasbrouck of the civil liberties group The Identity Project.
Hasbrouck and other privacy and immigrant advocates complain AAMVA took weeks to notify California and other members about the federal demands and initially agreed to the bulk sharing.
AAMVA spokesperson Claire Jeffrey declined to respond to questions about the federal demands but said in a statement that “AAMVA is working through the challenging circumstances of the data request and now active litigation” and that AAMVA “remains committed to working with all interested parties to navigate competing concerns in this matter.”
The office of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who backed the data sharing, calls concerns about the demands overblown — much as it did this summer after critics warned that any California data shared with AAMVA was at risk of federal subpoena.
Tapping state licenses for a federal crackdown
The Trump administration’s license-data demands appear to be part of a broader and escalating crackdown on non-citizen truck drivers.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration began in May 2025 strictly enforcing English proficiency standards. The agency also in February 2026 finalized a new rule that would block immigrants with work permits, like asylum seekers, Temporary Protected Status holders or DACA recipients, who are in the United States legally, from qualifying for commercial driver’s licenses.
The federal government sought data from AAMVA on 17 million people with commercial driver’s licenses, according to court records and an Aug. 11 subpoena sent by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to the group, The subpoena stated that its purpose is “civil immigration enforcement.” The federal government asked for the name, date of birth, state of record, license number and Social Security number of every driver in AAMVA’s commercial license database going back five years.
The demand also asked the nonprofit group not to discuss the subpoena “for an indefinite period of time,” saying to do so “will impede the investigation and thereby interfere with the enforcement of federal law.”
Court records further detail a federal request to AAMVA made on June 25 for commercial driver’s license data. Amid “competing legal obligations” between state and federal governments, AAMVA initially agreed to hand over that information, so state officials threatened legal action. They argued that handing over the data would violate agreements made with state DMVs as well as state and federal privacy laws.
California has shared commercial license data to AAMVA for some time. Under the plan lawmakers funded in June, the DMV expects to begin uploading data on all non-commercial California license holders, including more than 1 million immigrants licensed under a 2013 state law allowing undocumented people to obtain driver’s licenses. The funding decision came after officials in the DMV and governor’s office argued that failure to share the license data could make California noncompliant with the 2005 REAL ID Act and that IDs issued by the state DMV could become invalid at airports and federal buildings.
According to a sworn declaration by Kristin Triepke, the chief of the California DMV’s Licensing Policy branch, the DMV first learned of the federal government’s demand to AAMVA for commercial license data on July 23, when the association’s chief executive emailed his board. That was 10 days after Newsom signed the bill that enabled data sharing. AAMVA signed an agreement with the California DMV last year pledging that the clearinghouse will not share commercial driver data without written permission.
In the declaration, Triepke warned that sharing driver data with federal authorities could result in more people who are not U.S. citizens choosing to drive without a license, which could “pose grave public-safety risks” to the public.
In an attempt to appease California and its other members, AAMVA planned to let state DMVs decide whether to share commercial driver’s license data in bulk with the federal government, according to an AAMVA court filing. This led to the Trump administration threatening that the U.S. Department of Transportation would cancel grants and terminate contracts with the group and the Department of Homeland Security to send AAMVA a subpoena since the federal government argued it has the right to obtain data about all people with commercial driver’s licenses.
A judge in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia temporarily blocked AAMVA from complying with the data demand on Aug. 21, calling it “unlawful.”
That judge, Judge Anthony Trenga is scheduled to hear arguments on Sept. 10 on whether to issue a preliminary injunction blocking AAMVA from releasing the data.
The legal battle over the license data could have major implications for whether states can safeguard driver data.
Newsom’s office disagrees.
Are Californians at risk?
The governor’s communications staff this spring accused CalMatters reporters of “manufacturing fear and panic with lies” for reporting on concerns about the license data sharing, including that shared data could be subpoenaed by the federal government. Asked about the subsequently discovered federal subpoena for shared license data, a spokesperson emphasized differences between the commercial driver information the Trump administration recently requested and the broader pool of driver data that lawmakers agreed to share with AAMVA. Both sets of information are maintained by AAMVA.
“(They) are separate systems governed by different rules, purposes and legal authorities,” said Diana Crofts-Pelayo, a spokesperson for Newsom. “The federal government’s demand at issue in this case is for bulk access to [commercial license] data — not the individual searches that federal officials already conduct — and California has not provided the requested bulk data.”
Crofts-Pelayo noted that, to get a license, commercial drivers already submit their Social Security numbers for verification through federal databases. A key argument against California sharing license data for noncommercial drivers is that missing or placeholder Social Security numbers could be used by federal authorities to target drivers for immigration enforcement.
Immigrant and privacy advocates, however, still see risks to California drivers from the state’s planned data sharing.
Saira Hussain, a senior staff attorney with the nonprofit digital privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the subpoena validates earlier fears about the sharing and that the DMV should hold off on its plans to provide the data.
“AAMVA’s response was entirely insufficient, as they took a full month to inform the states of the demand and even contemplated complying with the demand,” she said.
Crofts-Pelayo did not answer a question about whether the state will delay sharing non-commercial drivers’ data with AAMVA pending the outcome of this case.
The DMV said it cannot comment on the legal merits of DHS’ subpoena but that the department “takes seriously its responsibility to protect Californians’ personal information …”
“California has opposed the release of bulk commercial driver information,” said Eva Spiegal, the deputy director of public affairs for the DMV.
A DHS spokesman, who declined to provide their name, emailed CalMatters that, “It is incredibly dangerous for illegal aliens, who often don’t know our traffic laws or even English, to be operating vehicles on America’s roads. We look forward to winning this important argument in court.”
Advocates say the federal data demands are exactly what they were warning about ahead of the Legislature’s June vote to fund the license information sharing.
“We hate to have to say, ‘We told you so,’” said civil liberties advocate Hasbrouck. “But in this case, we told you so.”
