A conservative legal group filed a lawsuit seeking to block President Donald Trump’s sweeping global tariffs, challenging the administration’s use of emergency powers to upend the global trading system.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. Court of International Trade on Monday, challenges Trump’s use of a 1970s-era law to impose — and then partially pause — global tariffs on April 2, what the White House dubbed “Liberation Day.”
The Liberty Justice Center, a nonprofit conservative legal group based in Austin, Texas, filed the lawsuit on behalf of five businesses that it said were directly harmed by the tariffs because their businesses rely on the imported goods that cannot be sourced in the U.S.
At issue is the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which gives the president special authority over economic transactions during a national emergency. Trump is the first president to use the power to impose tariffs, first declaring a national emergency over the fentanyl crisis in the U.S. to impose tariffs on China, Canada and Mexico, then declaring that the U.S. trade deficit is a national emergency in order to impose steep new tariffs on dozens of trading partners around the world.
