Authorities in Oklahoma arrested an illegal alien with a driver's license and no name.
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt previously announced Operation Guardian, a deportation operation in conjunction with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). As part of the operation, Oklahoma Highway Patrol conducted a sweep along I-40 in the western part of the state that rounded up 125 illegal aliens. One such illegal alien was carrying a New York commercial driver's license (CDL) with "No Name Given" as the name.
“If New York wants to hand out CDLs to illegal immigrants with ‘No Name Given,’ that’s on them. The moment they cross into Oklahoma, they answer to our laws,” Stitt said in a
press release Monday. “I want to thank our troopers and ICE officials for their hard work. This is about keeping Oklahomans safe."
The press release included a scan of the seized CDL. The license was a limited-term CDL issued in April and expiring in 2028. The individual was listed at an address in Richmond Hill.
The sweep caught a total of 125 illegal aliens from countries including India, Uzbekistan, China, Russia, Georgia, Turkey, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Mauritania.
Stitt created Operation Guardian in November 2024 and announced its
implementation in February. The project directs state and local law enforcement to cooperate with federal law enforcement and transfer illegal aliens in state custody to federal immigration authorities for deportation.
New York State does not issue CDLs to individuals who are not citizens or lawful permanent residents. However, the state does have the Driver’s License Access and Privacy Act, a.k.a. the "
Green Light Law," enacted in 2019, which allows residents to apply for a standard driver's license "regardless of their citizenship or lawful status in the United States." The law also establishes that any records used to obtain a driver's license are not public records and cannot be used in any records request except under very narrow circumstances. It also explicitly bans the Department of Motor Vehicles from transmitting any such records to federal immigration enforcement authorities unless by a lawful court order; and in such cases requires the subject to be notified when those records are requested.
The issue of illegal aliens obtaining commercial drivers' licenses was thrust into the national spotlight last month when a semi-truck performed an illegal U-turn on the Florida Turnpike, killing three people. The driver, an illegal alien from India,
failed an English language proficiency and highway sign identification test.
Danielle Chaffin, a senior sales engineer at logistics software company Revenova, has been conducting independent research on the significant number of irregularities within Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's data and publishing it on her
X account. In an op-ed for the trucking trade news website
Freight Caviar, Chaffin identified 141 drivers registered with the U.S. Department of Transportation that were listed as "No Name Given" or a similar variation. She also identified 12 addresses where multiple companies are registered, including one where 27 companies are registered, and another with 23 registrations.
Additionally, another X user, Garrett Allen, built a website called
searchcarriers.com that tracks this same data. An initial search for "No Name Given" on the site yields 1,000 results (the full results are paywalled).
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy made an
announcement on non-domiciled commercial driver's licenses on Sept. 26, saying his department has launched a nationwide audit of the licenses "to get to the bottom of what we think is causing this crisis."
