Half of U.S. states are pushing back against President Trump’s latest global tariffs in a new lawsuit.

Spearheaded by New York’s Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James, the lawsuit calls for the Trump administration to halt the new tariffs, calling them a pretext for tariffs the Supreme Court struck down earlier this year.

“After losing at the Supreme Court, the administration is once again trying to illegally raise taxes on families and businesses with a new round of tariffs,” said James.

The case applies to the Section 301 “forced labor” tariffs, which Trump announced in late July after the temporary 10% tariff on imports from most countries using Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 ran out on July 24 just after midnight. Those just-expired tariffs followed a February 2026 Supreme Court decision that found Trump’s original 2025 enactment of tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act unconstitutional.

In addition to New York, the following states have joined as plaintiffs in the lawsuit: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.

According to the official legal filing, the states are asking a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of International Trade to block these new tariffs. They’ve also requested that the CIT, which has heard most of the tariff-related lawsuits over the past year, order full refunds to state agencies paying these levies.

These 25 states are not the first entities to raise concerns about President Trump’s new Section 301 tariffs. Just weeks ago, Liberty Justice Center filed a lawsuit, also in the CIT, on behalf of a New York-based retailer of spices and a California watch retailer, alleging the United States Trade Representative “acted arbitrarily and capriciously by imposing near-uniform tariffs across 60 materially different economies without a reasoned, record-based explanation for how the tariffs would address the practices USTR identified,” according to a statement.

Two other small businesses, Learning Resources and hand2mind, filed a second lawsuit on similar grounds. The names of these plaintiffs may sound familiar – both the Liberty Justice Center and Learning Resources challenged Mr. Trump’s IEEPA tariffs in cases that advanced to the Supreme Court and prompted its February ruling that struck the levies down as unconstitutional.

But according to Justin Angotti, an associate at the international law firm Reed Smith, interested parties should expect the court to move quickly on this issue. Unlike the IEEPA tariffs, the question on the docket is not whether the use of this statute is legal, but rather whether the USTR followed the appropriate procedures in identifying discriminatory labor practices.

“IEEPA was the easiest argument, because it was a big grab of power, whereas challenging the Section 301 tariffs is particularly difficult,” Angotti explains. “The administration will say that they went through the proper steps, but the court is going to be hesitant to weigh in on that type of political judgement.”