The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal District on Thursday granted the Trump administration's request to temporarily put on hold the New York-based Court of International Trade judgment that struck down President Trump's tariffs a day earlier.
The court stayed the order while the legal proceedings play out.
The plaintiffs — a group of U.S. states and small businesses — were asked to respond to the Trump administration's motions for a stay by June 5. A U.S. government response may be filed by June 9, the court said.
The order capped a frenzy of news related to the president's tariff policy. On Wednesday evening, the Court of International Trade ruled that the tariffs Trump imposed on April 2 on most countries are illegal. And earlier Thursday, a second federal court — the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia — blocked Trump's authority to unilaterally impose tariffs, ruling in favor of two Illinois toy importers, but the judge in the case, Rudolph Contreras, paused his ruling for 14 days while the government appeals. Both those courts ruled that the tariffs exceeded the president's power under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, which the Trump administration cited in imposing those tariffs.
White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Thursday: "We expect to fight this battle all the way to the Supreme Court."
Federal trade court blocks Trump's emergency tariffs, saying he overstepped authority
Wednesday's order — and what is almost certain to be a prolonged legal battle — struck at the heart of the sweeping tariffs, which unsettled consumers and sent stock markets plummeting.
Trump had moved to temporarily scale down those tariffs back to 10%. The ruling also struck down separate tariffs Trump imposed on China, Canada and Mexico, which the administration justified as a reaction to fentanyl trafficking.
In their Wednesday ruling, the court's three-judge panel wrote that Trump's worldwide tariffs had exceeded his power under IEEPA.
"Because of the Constitution's express allocation of the tariff power to Congress … we do not read IEEPA to delegate an unbounded tariff authority to the President," the court wrote.
The White House responded by rejecting the court's authority.
"It is not for unelected judges to decide how to properly address a national emergency," White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement. "President Trump pledged to put America First, and the Administration is committed to using every lever of executive power to address this crisis and restore American Greatness."
IEEPA, the law at the heart of the case, had never been used to impose tariffs until Trump did so. As the name suggests, the law gives a president broad economic powers during a national emergency.
The judgment came in a case brought against the administration by 12 states and five businesses.
While the court found Trump had exceeded his authority by imposing broad worldwide tariffs, the three-judge panel made a different argument in ruling against the fentanyl tariffs.
In that case, the court found that the president's argument — that the tariffs will create leverage to get other countries to crack down on drug trade — invalidates the tariffs. Under IEEPA, the judges wrote, a tariff must directly "deal with" the emergency a president cites when imposing the tariff. The fentanyl tariffs do not directly address the drug trade, the judges wrote, but instead merely attempt to create economic pressure within other countries.
The three judges were appointed by three separate presidents: Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan and Trump himself.
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