Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is pressuring California and other states to make sure immigrants who are in the country illegally aren`t granted the licenses.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy at a news conference in Philadelphia on Oct. 24. Ryan Collerd / Bloomberg / Getty Images

California will lose $160 million for delaying the revocations of 17,000 commercial driver`s licenses for immigrants, federal transportation officials announced Wednesday.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy already withheld $40 million in federal funding because he said California isn`t enforcing English proficiency requirements for truckers.

The state notified these drivers in the fall that they would lose their licenses after a federal audit found problems that included licenses for truckers and bus drivers that remained valid long after an immigrant`s visa expired. Some licenses were also given to citizens of Mexico and Canada who don`t qualify. More than one-quarter of the small sample of California licenses that investigators reviewed were unlawful.

But then last week California said it would delay those revocations until March after immigrant groups sued the state because of concerns that some groups were being unfairly targeted. Duffy said the state was supposed to revoke those licenses by Monday.

Duffy is pressuring California and other states to make sure immigrants who are in the country illegally aren`t granted the licenses.

"Our demands were simple: follow the rules, revoke the unlawfully-issued licenses to dangerous foreign drivers, and fix the system so this never happens again," Duffy said in a written statement. "[Gov.] Gavin Newsom has failed to do so - putting the needs of illegal immigrants over the safety of the American people."

Newsom`s office did not immediately respond after the action was announced Wednesday afternoon.

Enforcement ramped up after fatal crashes

The federal government began cracking down during the summer. The issue became prominent after a truck driver who was not authorized to be in the U.S. made an illegal U-turn and caused a crash in Florida that killed three people in August.

Duffy previously threatened to withhold millions of dollars in federal funding from California, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, New York, Texas, South Dakota, Colorado and Washington after audits found significant problems under the existing rules, including commercial licenses being valid long after an immigrant truck driver`s work permit expired. He had dropped the threat to withhold nearly $160 million from California after the state said it would revoke the licenses.

Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration Administrator Derek Barrs said California failed to live up to the promise it made in November to revoke all the flawed licenses by Jan. 5. The agency said the state also unilaterally decide to delay until March the cancellations of roughly 4,700 additional unlawful licenses that were discovered after the initial ones were found.

"We will not accept a corrective plan that knowingly leaves thousands of drivers holding noncompliant licenses behind the wheel of 80,000-pound trucks in open defiance of federal safety regulations," Barrs said.

Industry praises the enforcement

Trucking trade groups have praised the effort to get unqualified drivers who shouldn`t have licenses or can`t speak English off the road. They also applauded the Transportation Department`s moves to go after questionable commercial driver`s license schools.

"For too long, loopholes in this program have allowed unqualified drivers onto our highways, putting professional truckers and the motoring public at risk," said Todd Spencer, president of the Owner Operator Independent Drivers Association.

The spotlight has been on Sikh truckers because the driver in the Florida crash and the driver in another fatal crash in California in October are both Sikhs. So the Sikh Coalition, a national group defending the civil rights of Sikhs, and the San Francisco-based Asian Law Caucus filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the California drivers. They said immigrant truck drivers were being unfairly targeted.

Immigrants account for about 20% of all truck drivers, but these non-domiciled licenses immigrants can receive only represent about 5% of all commercial driver`s licenses or about 200,000 drivers. The Transportation Department also proposed new restrictions that would severely limit which noncitizens could get a license, but a court put the new rules on hold.