The Trump administration has ramped up its "third country" deportation tactic, recently sending more than 100 people, including Cubans and Afghans, to various African countries, internal government documents show. CBS News' Camilo…
Page A11From§Eachthe early bird edition — 31 August 2026
DOT closes 110 driving schools over English rules while deportees land in third countries.
As it ran on the front
Secretary Duffy's order is straightforward: 110 driving schools shut down, effective immediately, because they weren't meeting the English proficiency standard for commercial licensing. That's a safety rule, that's just — look, if you can't read a road sign you probably shouldn't be behind an eighteen-wheeler, that's not controversial, that's just common— did I call it a safety rule? It's actually an emergency order with no phase-in period, no grace window, a hundred and ten schools closed the same day it was announced. That's not a safety rule, that's a shutdown.
Meanwhile, and this is a completely separate matter, unrelated agency, unrelated statute, deportation flights landed in Africa this week carrying people the administration sent to third countries — not their home countries, third countries, a category that exists specifically so removal doesn't require the destination country's language, culture, or paperwork to match anything about the person being removed. So the same government that just closed 110 businesses over English proficiency standards is, in the same news cycle, putting people on planes to countries with no requirement that anybody involved shares a language at all.…
…(cont) I want to be clear these are two different offices, two different legal frameworks, this isn't one policy — okay, it's not one policy on paper, I'll give you that much. But it's one government, one week, one administration, and if you're going to make English comprehension the emergency justification for closing a business, you might want a consistent theory of when comprehension matters and when it doesn't.
There isn't one. There's an enforcement priority that tightens the rules for people trying to work here and loosens every rule for people the government is trying to remove. That's not a scandal with a name and a resignation attached. It's just the shape the rules take when the person applying them gets to pick which direction the rule points, and I should probably stop describing it that clearly.
“Same government, same week: shut 110 driving schools because the paperwork wasn't in English, then put people on planes to countries where nobody promised the paperwork would be in anything they read either. The rule about language only shows up when it's aimed at somebody trying to stay.”
“The driving school closures are a straightforward safety compliance matter, nothing to do with immigration policy broadly — well, the schools were flagged specifically for English proficiency among non-native speakers, so it's a little bit about immigration, but the deportation flights are a completely separate legal process, unrelated timing, coincidence.”
The receipts
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Monday his department is shutting down 110-plus driving schools that gave licenses to drivers who failed English language proficiency (ELP) tests. In a release, the Department of Transportation…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.