People watch the Doris Ocean container ship depart from the Port of Los Angeles on May 28, 2026 in Los Angeles.
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President Donald Trump’s global “Emancipation Day” tariffs have been invalidated in court, shattering the foundation of his trade agenda. Some trade experts say his new role, which has already faced its first legal challenge, could suffer the same fate.
The Trump administration on Friday imposed sweeping tariffs on products from more than 80 countries, citing a failure to effectively ban the use of forced labor practices.
The latest tariffs, which apply to trading partners that cover 99.4% of U.S. trade, were introduced under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which allows the government to impose import taxes in response to unfair trade practices. Section 301 has been used numerous times throughout presidential administrations to threaten or impose tariffs, including against China during the first Trump administration.
But President Trump is “using this statute in a fundamentally different way,” Peter Harrell, a visiting fellow at Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute of International Economic Law, told CNBC.
Harrell said Section 301 was not intended to “allow the president to simply wholesale rewrite the tariff” and impose “permanent” tariffs, adding that Trump’s recent use of the provision “certainly” could be struck down in court.
President Trump appears to view Section 301 as an important path toward additional tariffs. He declared on Friday that he would “immediately” launch a Section 301 investigation into the EU in retaliation for the hefty fines the United States imposed on American tech giants. This was the latest in a series of tariff actions taken by President Trump in recent days, including imposing a 25% tariff on imports from Brazil and a 50% tariff on some goods from Canada, also through the 301 investigation.
The legal battle has already begun. Just hours after the new tariffs went into effect, two small businesses filed a lawsuit, claiming the government is using Section 301 as a pretext to re-establish the same global tariff system that the Supreme Court struck down five months ago.
A new lawsuit filed in the U.S. Court of International Trade notes that Section 301 tariffs went into effect at the same time as other tariffs expired.
The expiration of these obligations, brought under Section 122 of the 1974 Act, was announced by President Trump just hours after the Supreme Court struck down the global tariffs on February 20th. Using Section 122 powers, these tariffs had an end date set.
The high court has ruled that the law President Trump used to unilaterally impose tariffs on nearly every other country, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), does not actually authorize the imposition of tariffs.
Friday’s lawsuit alleges that President Trump’s new tariffs, while ostensibly aimed at addressing forced labor practices, “are intended to maintain substantially the same broad tariff regime that this court and the Supreme Court have determined Congress has disallowed.”
Section 301 is “not an independent authority to tax substantially all imports from substantially all trading partners at rates chosen not to eliminate specified foreign practices but to reproduce the invalidated IEEPA tariff regime,” the complaint states.
The Trump administration insists it’s not just looking for ways to revive Emancipation Day.
Addressing forced labor “is something that President Trump has been focused on for many years,” a senior administration official told reporters on a call Thursday about tariffs.
As for timing, the person said, “We are implementing this at this time to avoid complications.”
A spokesperson for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment on the lawsuit.
The new lawsuit was brought by the Liberty Justice Center, which represented plaintiffs in a successful challenge to President Trump’s use of IEEPA.
The legal nonprofit argues that the Trump administration “cannot maintain predetermined global tariff policy simply by moving from one statute to another.”
Other experts contacted by CNBC agreed.
“In my view, Section 301 tariffs are clearly illegal,” Kimberly Clausing, a professor of tax law at UCLA School of Law and a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said in an email.
Clausing said the tariffs go beyond the intent of the statute and argued that the administration’s focus on forced labor is “just a pretext to restructure the IEEPA tariff system.” He said there was “no evidence linking these types of trade measures to the supposed policy goal” of cracking down on forced labor.
Clausing said he was “never sure” what the court would decide, adding that it would take time for legal challenges to work their way through the legal system.
Alan Wolf, another senior fellow at PIIE, said in a blog post Thursday that the Supreme Court will likely strike down the forced labor tariff.
“To exercise Section 301’s retaliation powers, a country’s acts, policies, or practices must be found to burden U.S. commerce,” Wolf wrote. “This requirement is clearly not met for the 60 targeted countries, which account for nearly all of U.S. imports and 90% of global trade.”
Greta Peisch, a former general counsel at the U.S. Trade Representative and a partner at Wiley Reign, told CNBC that the Trump administration has taken the necessary legal steps to impose Section 301 tariffs, but she is not so convinced.
He said the wording of the law “gives the government significant flexibility”. “I think that’s a pretty difficult standard to have to refute.”
Andrew Siciliano, head of global trade and U.S. trade and customs at KPMG, told CNBC in an email that Section 301’s extensive track record “could make it more difficult to lift” new tariffs.
“From a business perspective, this means companies need to plan around the tariffs that currently exist, rather than assuming they will be lifted or changed soon,” he said.
