US trade court rules Trump exceeded his authority with ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of International Trade has ruled that President Donald Trump “exceeded his authority” when he imposed his so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2.

The court also struck down the tariffs Trump imposed on Mexican, Canadian and Chinese imports with the stated aim of combatting fentanyl and drug trafficking from those countries.

In an unsigned opinion released Wednesday, the judges ruled the tariffs will be “vacated,” and they “permanently enjoined” the government from enforcing them.

They granted the plaintiffs summary judgment, rather than a temporary injuction, because they found “no genuine dispute as to any material fact.” The judges said the ruling would be enforced nationwide because unlawful tariffs cannot be collected from anyone, anywhere.

The Department of Justice immediately appealed the ruling.

The bombshell decision, which eviscerates major planks of Trump’s trade policy, came in response to a lawsuit in which the attorneys general of twelve states and a number of small American companies urged the court to strike down the import taxes on the grounds that Trump had exceeded his authority.

The attorney general of one of the 12 states that successfully blocked the tariffs, Kris Mayes of Arizona, took to X on Wednesday night to celebrate the news.

“Big news! The US Court of International Trade just struck down Trump’s illegal tariff scheme as invalid under [the International Emergency Economic Powers Act],” Mayes wrote. “The president does not have the authority to implement tariffs unilaterally. Glad to have co-led this case with Oregon to protect Arizona families and small biz.”

The court noted that Trump’s tariffs exceed the authority Congress granted to presidents under his cited International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a 1977 law which lays out how the executive can impose import taxes in limited circumstances pursuant to a national emergency.

The judges said Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, which set a 10 percent baseline tax on all imports and even higher taxes on imports from nearly every one of America’s trading partners, “exceed any authority granted to the President by IEEPA to regulate importation by means of tariffs.”

They also rejected Trump’s use of the emergency powers to tax Mexican, Canadian and Chinese imports because those tariffs don’t specifically “deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared,” as required by law.

The court rejected the Trump administration's arguments that claimed the president had broad authority in the current situation to impose tariffs under his emergency powers.

“An unlimited delegation of tariff authority would constitute an improper abdication of legislative power to another branch of government,” the judges noted, noting that “any interpretation of IEEPA that delegates unlimited tariff authority is unconstitutional.”

Attorneys for the government had argued that Trump’s decision to declare a national emergency and invoke his emergency economic powers was not reviewable by the courts. The did concede, however, that Congress could, in theory, reverse the tariffs by terminating the national emergency with a new law.

The judges said that the IEEPA requires more than an emergency declaration alone.

They cited the law’s requirement for “an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared” and its prohibition on using that authority “for any other purpose.”

They also found that the use of tariffs did not appropriately “deal with” the drug trafficking problem cited by Trump in his declaration, and rejected the administration’s argument that Trump could use the emergency tariff powers to vaguely “pressure” foreign governments.

“The Government’s ‘pressure’ argument effectively concedes that the direct effect of the country-specific tariffs is simply to burden the countries they target ... [to] induce the target countries to crack down on trafficking within their jurisdictions,” the ruling states.

“However sound this might be as a diplomatic strategy, it does not comfortably meet the statutory definition of ‘deal[ing] with’ the cited emergency. It is hard to conceive of any IEEPA power that could not be justified on the same ground of ‘pressure,’” the judges concluded.

A White House spokesperson, Kush Desai, savaged the ruling in a statement in which he claimed that the court had not disputed the fact that “foreign countries’ nonreciprocal treatment of the United States” had “ fueled America’s historic and persistent trade deficits” which had in turn “created a national emergency that has decimated American communities, left our workers behind, and weakened our defense industrial base.”

It’s not for “unelected judges to decide how to properly address a national emergency. President Trump pledged to put America First, and the Administration is committed to using every lever of executive power to address this crisis and restore American Greatness,” he said.

The White House has had some success in convincing various circuit courts of appeal and the U.S. Supreme Court to temporarily block adverse rulings while litigation continues in lower courts, but Trump lawyers may not have that same success with this court.

The U.S. Court of International Trade is a specialized court charged with hearing cases dealing with trade-related disputes and laws, and the court’s decisions must first be appealed to another unique court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

That court is another specialized court that has national jurisdiction, and it happens to be the only one of the nation’s appellate courts to which Trump has not appointed a single judge.

The court’s national reach means the Trump administration won’t be able to ask the Supreme Court to intervene based on a disagreement between circuit courts in different parts of the country. And the high court has often been loathe to intervene when asked to take up appeals of Federal Circuit decisions in the past.