How many fatal truck crashes each year involve non‑domiciled or foreign‑issued commercial driver’s licenses, by year?
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Executive summary
Federal agencies and reporting show only a fragmentary public trail: FMCSA/FARS maintain license‑status tables that can produce year‑by‑year counts, but the available reporting here supplies explicit counts for 2025 only — “at least five” fatal crashes involving non‑domiciled CDLs in 2025 — while prior years’ specific counts are not printed in the provided documents [1] [2] [3] [4]. Analysts who examined 2025 data points estimate those five crashes represent a vanishing share of all large‑truck fatalities in typical years (estimates range near 0.2–0.31% of fatal truck crashes during the observed portion of 2025) [5] [6].
1. What the records actually contain and what they don’t
The federal Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) and FMCSA “License Status” tables track driver license status for fatal large‑truck crashes and are the authoritative sources for year‑by‑year counts, but the excerpts in this reporting do not give a completed time series of “non‑domiciled” CDL involvement by year; they only point readers to People Table 25 and the A&I Crash Statistics dashboard where those queries must be run to extract annual counts [7] [4].
2. The explicit, documented count for 2025 and how agencies report it
The Department of Transportation and FMCSA publicly stated that, since the start of 2025, agency audits and reviews have identified at least five fatal crashes involving non‑domiciled CDL holders — a figure repeated in the Federal Register notice, FMCSA interim rule documents, and DOT press materials [1] [2] [8]. FreightWaves and other outlets reported FMCSA’s summary that those five incidents collectively killed 12 people and injured 15, which the agency used to justify an emergency interim rule restricting non‑domiciled CDL eligibility [3].
3. How that 2025 figure compares to total fatal truck crashes
Observers and advocacy reporting place the five identified 2025 crashes in context by comparing them to overall large‑truck fatality counts: one analysis notes there were roughly 4,094 fatal truck crashes in 2021 and argues five crashes are a minuscule fraction of a typical year’s total [5]. Industry commentary and one insurance analysis calculated the five incidents represented about 0.31% of roughly 1,600 fatal truck crashes reported by mid‑2025 — a snapshot ratio rather than a full‑year rate [6]. Those percentages are reported estimates, not formal FMCSA rate tables in the provided excerpts [6] [5].
4. Limitations, ambiguity and where a definitive year‑by‑year answer would come from
No source in the provided set publishes a completed, public year‑by‑year table explicitly labeled “fatal crashes involving non‑domiciled or foreign‑issued CDLs, by year” — the FMCSA data infrastructure (People Table 25 in Large Truck and Bus Crash Facts and the A&I Crash Statistics tool) is capable of producing that time series but the exact annual counts were not extracted or printed in the materials supplied here, so a definitive multi‑year list cannot be asserted from these sources alone [7] [4].
5. Divergent interpretations and political context
Federal officials used the 2025 incidents to justify emergency regulation and to cite systemic licensing failures, while critics and labor groups point to FMCSA and DOT data indicating non‑domiciled CDL holders make up a small share of drivers and an even smaller share of fatal crashes — for example, commentators argue non‑domiciled drivers account for roughly 5% of CDLs but only about 0.2% of fatal crashes in cited analyses [5] [6]. Reporting from NPR and AP emphasizes how these numbers feed a broader political debate over immigration, enforcement, and state issuance practices, underscoring that policy action is as much driven by a few high‑profile crashes and audit findings as by steady trend data [9] [10].
6. Practical next steps to produce the exact year‑by‑year counts
To get a precise, reproducible year‑by‑year list, one must query FMCSA’s A&I Crash Statistics or download People Table 25 from the Large Truck and Bus Crash Facts reports and filter by domicile/non‑domicile status and calendar year; the FMCSA/FARS datasets are the only authoritative source for those counts — the documents provided here describe that capability but do not export the full series [7] [4].