Tonight in Your Rights: Trump's tariffs voided in three-judge slapdown

The U.S. Court of International Trade found Trump's tariffs to be unlawful. Plus, Trump retreats again on his immigration agenda.

Donald Trump delivers remarks on tariffs as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick holds a chart in the Rose Garden. (Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty)

An estimated 180 rulings have at least temporarily blocked Trump’s actions.

You subscribe to All Rise News because you want to keep up with them — but you’re not just waiting for the courts to take action.

Donald Trump’s tariffs were always illegal.

That was the unanimous determination from a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of International Trade on Wednesday afternoon.

“The challenged tariff orders will be vacated and their operation permanently enjoined,” declared Judges Gary S. Katzmann, Timothy M. Reif, and Jane A. Restani, writing in a single voice.

The judges were appointed by presidents across the political spectrum: Trump appointed Reif, one of the members of the panel. Restani is a Ronald Reagan appointee, and Katzmann is a Barack Obama appointee.

Each stood in complete agreement on every word of the 49-page order pronouncing Trump’s tariffs “unlawful.” The order was per curiam, meaning that they claimed equal authorship. Trump was the first and only president to have claimed the unilateral power to impose tariffs, asserting that power under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977.

The legislation does not contain the word “tariff,” and the three-judge panel determined the law never intended to grant him such “unbounded” authority.

“The court holds for the foregoing reasons that IEEPA does not authorize any of the worldwide, retaliatory, or trafficking tariff orders,” the opinion states, using the acronym for that legislation.

Trump claimed that international gangs and cartels justified his tariffs, but the court noted that the “mere incantation of ‘national emergency’ cannot, of course, sound the death-knell of the Constitution.”

Several businesses and states sued to challenge the legality of Trump’s tariffs, and one of the plaintiffs, New York Attorney General Letitia James, called the decision a “major victory for our efforts to uphold the law.”

“The law is clear: no president has the power to single-handedly raise taxes whenever they like,” James wrote in a statement. “These tariffs are a massive tax hike on working families and American businesses that would have led to more inflation, economic damage to businesses of all sizes, and job losses across the country if allowed to continue.”

Melinda St. Louis, the director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, minced no words: “Trump abused sweeping, unstrategic tariffs as part of a corrupt, authoritarian power grab to bully foreign countries and force U.S. companies to bend the knee to him and his billionaire friends.”

The Trump administration quickly filed a notice of appeal of the ruling, which is set to take effect in 10 days under the terms of the judgment. The full opinion can be read here.

Trump’s immigration retreat

Wall Street reportedly had become so primed to expect Trump to back down from his tariffs that traders coined a mocking acronym to describe the retreat: “TACO,” short for Trump Always Chickens Out.

To the relief of one asylum seeker, the Trump administration reversed itself again in the case of a man identified in court papers only as “O.C.G.,” who is currently hiding from anti-gay persecution in Guatemala.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Enforcement and Removal Operations “is currently working with ICE Air to bring O.C.G. back to the United States on an Air Charter Operations (ACO) flight return leg,” a senior Justice Department lawyer disclosed in a status report today.

This follows a long ordeal for “O.C.G.,” who spoke of his constant state of fear in a sworn declaration last week.

“Since I arrived here, I have been living in hiding, in constant panic and constant fear. I’ve been here living this way for over two months,” he wrote.

“I am living alone in a house my sister owns,” his declaration continues. “I don’t stay in any of the places I used to stay because the story is the same as ever here: gay people like me are targeted simply for who we are. This produces constant fear and panic. My mother and cousins and other relatives have been helping me out so that I don’t have to go outside very much, because this situation is so dangerous for me.”

It is undisputed that the Trump administration unlawfully expelled O.C.G. to Guatemala after an immigration judge found he could face harm there.

Mahmoud Khalil’s mixed victory

Protest for Mahmoud Khalil (Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)

Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil’s detention was likely unconstitutional, a federal judge ruled today, but for now, Khalil will remain in immigration detention pending further information about the government’s claims that there were omissions in his green card applications.

U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz found that Khalil is “likely to succeed on the merits” of his argument that the legal basis for his removal was unconstitutionally vague. Secretary of State Marco Rubio predicated his attempt to deport Khalil on a statute depicting his ongoing presence in the United States as against a “foreign policy interest,” but the judge did not accept the claim.

“[Rubio’s] determination says nothing about foreign countries. Not explicitly. And not implicitly, either,” Farbiarz wrote. “There is no suggestion in the Secretary’s determination that U.S. relations with other countries have been impacted by [Khalil’s] conduct.”

This is one of a spate of rulings striking down the Trump administration’s attempts to deport pro-Palestinian students, including Rümeysa Öztürk and Mohsen Mahdawi, whose case one federal judge compared to the Red Scare.

Unlike Khalil, Öztürk and Mahdawi have been ordered to be released on bail.

Note: Look out for my interviews on tariffs, BigLaw and more.

Brian Tyler Cohen

and I spoke on his YouTube channel, and

Allison Gill

and I went through the latest headlines again for the next episode of her “Daily Beans” podcast.