Trump's Crackdown and NYC's School Bus Shortage

TL;DR

If your child takes a NYC bus, the beginning of the school year is a time for crossing fingers—and damage assessment. Nearly 2,000 NYC special ed students started the year with no assigned bus company. Two hundred yellow bus routes didn't have a vendor.

A shortage of drivers — due in large part by three federal immigration actions in the past seven months — is a major reason why, I’ve been told. Two more decisions, still pending, could make it worse before winter.

“It's illegal to leave thousands of students with disabilities without a bus for the start of the school year,” said Randi Levine, policy director at Advocates for Children of New York. “The students most likely to be without routes are those with the most intensive needs who are often placed in schools farthest from where they live."

So true, and the causes are layered: a wave of companies exiting city contracts, and a driver pool now being squeezed by federal immigration enforcement.

Corey Muirhead, Executive Vice President of Logan Bus Company, one of New York City's largest school bus operators, spoke to Lighthouse. 

"This is federal policy that is affecting local lives," Muirhead said. "The majority of the drivers in this industry are immigrants, and they work in the communities that we serve."

In April 2025, President Trump signed an executive order directing the Department of Transportation to tighten how commercial driver's licenses get verified. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy directed the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to sharply restrict "non-domiciled" CDLs — licenses issued to drivers who don't yet have permanent legal status.

By December 2025, New York was singled out by federal auditors as the nation's "worst offender," with more than half of a sampled batch of non-domiciled licenses found to have been issued unlawfully. When the state disputed the finding, the federal government pulled $73 million in highway funding — money New York is still fighting to recover.

The New York School Bus Contractors Association, the industry's Albany advocacy group, wrote that 5 percent of the state's school bus drivers held non-domiciled CDLs. By the time those licenses came up for renewal, Muirhead said, all of them were revoked.

"That crushed us at the end of last year," Muirhead said.

Doing rough math from there — the state has roughly 50,000 to 55,000 school bus drivers, Muirhead estimated — a 5 percent loss works out to somewhere around 2,500 drivers statewide, each running routes that can average 30 kids. "You just put 75,000 kids without a school bus driver," he said, cautioning that the number is an estimate. He would not speculate on how much of that loss fell specifically on New York City, citing only a Newsday report that Long Island alone lost roughly 1,000 non-domiciled drivers.

Muirhead said Logan's own workforce is "90-something percent minority driven," with immigrants making up "a very large portion" of that number — one reason, he said, why a policy aimed narrowly at immigration status lands so heavily across the industry. When border doors close, so do school bus doors.

Many of the individual losses defy rationale and empathy. "There were people that had been drivers for 20 years that just never had their permanent card and they lost their license. How was that fair?"

In July 2026, the federal government terminated Temporary Protected Status for Haitian nationals — effective July 27, following a Supreme Court ruling in June that cleared the way after a monthslong court fight. Brooklyn and Queens are home to the two largest Haitian populations in the country, Muirhead said, and many of the industry's drivers live in the same communities they serve.

"Employees must re-verify their status, and they can't continue employing anyone without a current work authorization," he said. "That completely decimated the Haitian population" within the driver workforce.

The most recent shock hit just last week: the federal government has not yet fully terminated Temporary Protected Status for Salvadoran nationals, but the uncertainty alone is enough. Drivers are walking off the job pre-emptively rather than risk working without authorization once a final decision comes down.

"They didn't show up to work," Muirhead said. Unlike the first two waves, this one is still unresolved — meaning the industry doesn't yet know how deep the loss will go, only that it's already begun.

"Those three headwinds that we've experienced in a matter of seven months are just completely soul-crushing to the industry," Muirhead said.

It isn't over. Sara Catalinotto, of Parents to Improve School Transportation (PIST NYC), said advocates tracking TPS terminations nationally are watching two more dates: Sudan and Ukraine TPS status is set to end October 19, 2026, and Lebanon's status — currently on an extension after DHS missed its own review deadline — faces a decision by November 27. Any of those could pull more drivers out of New York's already-strained bus workforce.

Every driver lost to these three actions, Muirhead said, was a taxed worker, not an undocumented one operating off the books. "You just put [thousands] on the street with no money to feed their families" — and, on the other side of the ledger, thousands of children without a driver. 

Muirhead said he doesn't believe the shortage is meaningfully worse this year than last — there was a driver shortage in 2025 too, for the same underlying reasons, he said — but that scrutiny of the industry has intensified since a contentious PEP vote last year. 

"I think that there's just a lot of — I have to be delicate saying it this way," he said. Last year's contentious Panel for Educational Policy vote, he said, put "a target on the industry's back," with "some professional dart throwers" using the bus system as an easy target. That's at odds with advocates like Levine, who has called this year's busing rollout unlike anything she's seen in years of advocacy.

Muirhead was referring to the fall 2025 fight over the industry's contract: after Logan and three other major companies threatened layoffs and a service stoppage rather than accept a shorter deal, the city's Panel for Educational Policy voted unanimously in October to reject a proposed five-year extension, ultimately approving a three-year contract in November — a standoff that put the busing companies under scrutiny.

Beyond immigration policy, two other factors are straining the system:

The driver shortage is also straining the routes still running: drivers picking up two routes in one shift, and more children packed onto buses—four year-old with 18-year-olds.

Lighthouse is reporting on those on-the-ground effects — GPS trackers that don't track, kids stuck on buses for hours, dispatch lines that ring for half an hour with no answer — in a separate piece drawing on parent accounts across the five boroughs.

Said Muirhead: "It's simple. For every parent — the routes should be fine, right? That's the goal. And you can point to the busing statistics, and this is what we always have to keep in context, right? It's got a 98% success, but guess what? That 2% represents thousands of families and thousands of kids. And that's just still not okay."