WASHINGTON — Twenty-five Democratic-led states sued the Trump administration Monday over its latest round of import taxes, arguing that the White House is using a forced-labor rationale as a pretext to reinstate tariffs the Supreme Court struck down in February.
The complaint, filed in the U.S. Court of International Trade in New York, asks the court to halt the duties, declare them unlawful and order refunds of tariffs already collected. If the states prevail, they would remove the administration's second replacement scheme in six months and revive the question of how much of President Trump's global tariff agenda can survive judicial review.
The tariffs at issue
The duties, imposed last month, range from 10 percent to 12.5 percent and cover 59 countries plus the European Union — a group the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative says accounts for 99.4 percent of American imports. They took effect in July, just as a temporary 10 percent global tariff Trump had turned to after the Supreme Court defeat expired at midnight July 24. The administration invoked Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, which lets the president act against countries engaged in unfair trade practices, and charged that the targeted governments had not done enough to crack down on imports produced with forced labor.
The state case
"After losing at the Supreme Court, the administration is once again trying to illegally raise taxes on families and businesses with a new round of tariffs," New York Attorney General Letitia James said. The complaint calls the duties "arbitrary, capricious, and contrary to law" and treats the USTR's forced-labor investigation as its central weakness. Where the first Trump administration spent eight months investigating Chinese practices before imposing Section 301 tariffs in 2018, the states note, the current probe covered 60 trading partners in roughly two months.
The narrow spread of the rates and the grouping of widely different economies into four bands, the filing argues, "strongly suggest no real relationship between the purportedly unreasonable practices of every substantial United States trading partner and the tariff rates the USTR is imposing on them."
The plaintiffs
Joining New York are Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin. New York Governor Kathy Hochul framed the suit as consumer defense. "President Trump's illegal tariffs are nothing more than a tax on hardworking families," Hochul said. The action follows a separate case filed by the Liberty Justice Center on behalf of two small businesses making a similar executive-authority claim.
The White House response
White House spokesman Kush Desai said the administration is "using its lawful authority" to address forced-labor abuses that "burden U.S. commerce," and pointed to the statute's track record. "Section 301 tariffs have proven to be a legally durable tool since the President's first term, and they remain so now," Desai said.
The counterargument
Section 301 carries legal weight the earlier justification lacked. When Trump invoked the same statute in 2018 to hit Chinese goods, the tariffs survived court challenges and remain in effect. Alex Capri, a business lecturer at the National University of Singapore, told the BBC the new lawsuit will pose a "formidable challenge" to the levies but predicted the administration would use "carve outs and walk-backs to gradually take the bite out of these tariffs" rather than lose them outright.
The Court of International Trade has not set a hearing schedule. The administration, meanwhile, is investigating 16 additional countries over what it calls manufacturing overcapacity — a probe that could produce a fourth round of tariffs before the current one is tested in court.