Trump's latest global tariffs face trade court challenge

President Donald Trump's near-global tariff policy is being challenged in federal court — again.

A panel of three judges at the U.S. Court of International Trade in Manhattan are hearing arguments Wednesday morning from a group of small businesses and Democratic-led states who say Trump's sweeping "Section 301" tariffs overstep the law.

It's the third time in less than two years that the courts have been asked to intervene against the president's attempt to impose sweeping tariffs on the vast majority of U.S. imports.

The Supreme Court in February struck down the "reciprocal" tariffs that Trump had unveiled in April 2025, trashing a huge piece of his trade agenda and forcing his administration to refund more than $100 billion.

The day that ruling came down, Trump announced a worldwide 10% tariff under a different statute known as Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. That authority only allowed the tariffs to last for 150 days — but in that interval, the federal trade court ruled against them. An appeals court paused that ruling, allowing them to stay in effect for their duration.

Right as those tariffs expired in July, the Trump administration imposed new duties under Section 301 of the same 1974 trade law.

The 301 tariffs impose 10% or 12.5% rates on goods from 86 countries, covering 99.4% of U.S. imports. The administration said they were imposed in response to the targeted countries failing to effectively enforce bans on the trade of goods produced using forced-labor practices.

The legal challenge being heard Wednesday morning contends that the administration invoked the forced-labor argument as a pretext to reimpose the worldwide tariffs that were previously struck down.

"In short, Defendants have now tried to re-create materially the same global tariff regime under three disparate statutes," the plaintiffs wrote in a court filing in August in the case, which consolidates multiple legal challenges. "But there is a reason they did not begin with Section 301 and are instead turning to it now only as a last resort."

Attorneys for the Department of Justice insist the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative fully complied with the law.

"The actions that USTR has taken at the direction of the President in this case are consistent with the text, object, and purpose of the Section 301 statute, as well as with the President's firm commitment to create a level playing field for U.S. workers, producers, and exporters by conditioning access to the U.S. market on concrete action to prohibit international trade in forced labor goods," they told the court in early September.

Trump in late July told Fox News that the 301 tariffs are "doing the same thing" as the ones that the Supreme Court struck down.

Sara Albrecht, chairman and CEO of Liberty Justice Center, the legal nonprofit that brought one of the lawsuits against the new tariffs, told CNBC at the time that Trump's remarks bolstered their argument.