By Rebekah Riess, Chris Boyette, CNN

(CNN) — The State Department is pausing the issuing of work visas for foreigners looking to become commercial truck drivers in the United States, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Thursday.

“The increasing number of foreign drivers operating large tractor-trailer trucks on U.S. roads is endangering American lives and undercutting the livelihoods of American truckers,” Rubio said in a post on X.

The post did not elaborate further on reasons for the move. It comes after the US Department of Transportation said it was investigating a truck driver accused of making an illegal U-turn that caused a wreck and killed three people on Florida’s Turnpike August 12. Federal authorities allege he entered the US illegally.

The driver, 28-year-old Harjinder Singh, had a commercial driver’s license in California, the Florida highway safety department said. Federal regulations prohibit someone illegally in the country from getting a commercial driver’s license.

Singh flew to California after the crash, but US marshals arrested him there last week after federal transportation investigators interviewed him and after Florida officials issued a warrant charging him with three counts of vehicle homicide, the marshals service said.

US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement issued an immigration detainer for Singh after his August 16 arrest, meaning “he will be transferred to ICE custody the moment his criminal case (in Florida) concludes,” the Department of Homeland Security said Monday. And federal transportation officials say they are investigating whether California violated regulations by issuing Singh a limited-term commercial driver’s license.

The Transportation Department also said Singh appeared to be in violation of its recent requirement that commercial motor vehicle drivers speak English well.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy in May signed an order saying commercial motor vehicle drivers need to be proficient in English, and if they aren’t, they will be placed out of service. The order went into effect June 25.

Singh failed an English language proficiency test when federal transportation officials interviewed him in California last week, “providing correct responses to just two of 12 verbal questions and only accurately identifying one of four highway traffic signs,” the transportation department said.

The American Trucking Associations expressed support for the State Department’s visa pause this week, saying the issuance of commercial drivers licenses to non-US citizens “needs serious scrutiny, including the enforcement of entry-level driver training standards.”

“At a minimum, we need better accounting of how many non-domiciled CDLs are being issued,” a statement from the ATA’s president, Chris Spear, reads. “We also believe a surge in enforcement of key regulations – including motor carrier compliance – is necessary to prevent bad actors from operating on our nation’s highways, and we’ll continue to partner with federal and state authorities to identify where those gaps in enforcement exist.”

Following last week’s fatal crash in Florida, the organization called for more “robust entry-level driver training standards,” and noted their continued concern that “fraudulent and non-compliant entities continue to fast-track CDL applicants with minimal, if any, training.”

In testimony last month before a Senate commerce subcommittee, the ATA acknowledged a driver shortage in the trucking industry. While a slump in freight means the shortage isn’t acute as it had been three years prior, “the industry fully expects the shortage to worsen when the freight market recovers,” a statement that Spear submitted to the committee reads.

“Over the next decade, trucking companies will need to hire roughly 1.2 million new drivers to keep pace with growing freight demand and an aging workforce,” the statement reads.

When asked what impact the visa pause could have on the driver shortage, ATA spokesperson Evan Fallor told CNN, “While we are working to get more details from the administration, our initial understanding is that this pause applies to a very small population relative to the overall driver workforce.”

The new English proficiency requirements already were set to squeeze the nation’s pool of 3.5 million drivers, according to FreightWaves, a price reporting agency focused on the global freight market. The rule to put drivers who fail the standards out of service “could sideline 40,000 to 60,000 interstate CDL holders,” the agency wrote in July.

Defendant extradited to Florida

Singh was extradited to Florida on Thursday. It wasn’t immediately clear if he had an attorney in that state. He had made an appearance in California’s San Joaquin County court on Tuesday, a public defender assigned to Singh’s case told The Associated Press.

“Mr. Singh was in court on Tuesday afternoon and he signed the paperwork that acknowledged he was the person Florida was looking for but did not in any way admit to any criminal charges,” attorney Jennifer Perkins said in an email to the AP.

Perkins said she was “not at liberty” to discuss Singh’s citizenship status, according to the AP.

California had given Singh a limited-term, “non-domiciled” commercial driver’s license in July 2024, the Transportation Department said. The California Department of Motor Vehicles told CNN the “federal government confirmed Mr. Singh’s legal presence in the United States” when it approved the license.

“The DMV followed all federal and state laws in reviewing and granting (Singh) his California commercial driver’s license,” the California DMV said in a release Monday.

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CNN’s Chris Isidore contributed to this report.