The legal foundation for these tariffs - the Section 301 provision originally enacted in the Trade Act of 1974 - has historically been used to target specific unfair trade practices by individual countries, not to impose sweeping duties across dozens of nations. The Supreme Court's February 2026 decision striking down the previous IEEPA-based tariffs left the administration searching for alternative authority, and critics argue the forced-labor rationale is a pretext to bypass that ruling.
The official reason: those countries have not done enough to stop forced labor.
The affected trading partners cover 99.4% of all U.S. trade. Brazil got hit with a 25% duty rate under the same authority. Canada faces a threatened 50% rate on certain goods. Alan Wolff of the Peterson Institute for International Economics noted that the roster includes 60 of the more than 80 targeted countries accounting for nearly all U.S. imports and 90 percent of world trade.
Critics argue the real goal is not ending forced labor. Kimberly Clausing, a professor at UCLA School of Law, says the administration is using forced labor as "a mere pretext for recreating the IEEPA tariff regime" - the broad tariff system the Supreme Court struck down five months ago on February 20. In her view, the new tariffs are "clearly unlawful."
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The lawsuit will move through the U.S. Court of International Trade. And the experts do not agree on what happens next.
Peter Harrell, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University Law Center, says the administration is "using the statute in a fundamentally different way" than Congress intended. Section 301 was "never intended for the president to just wholesale rewrite the tariff schedule," he said, adding that the new tariffs could "for sure" be struck down in court.
Greta Peisch, a former general counsel for the U.S. Trade Representative who now works at Wiley Rein, points out that Section 301 "gives a lot of flexibility." She thinks the government has a strong case: "I think it's a pretty difficult standard to have to argue against."
Alan Wolff of the Peterson Institute notes a key legal requirement: to use Section 301, the president must find that a country's acts burden U.S. commerce. "That requirement is not clearly satisfied for the 60 targeted countries," he wrote. He believes the Supreme Court will probably invalidate these forced‑labor tariffs.
Andrew Siciliano, who leads trade and customs globally and in the U.S. at KPMG, says these tariffs "may be harder to unwind" than the previous ones because they rest on a different legal foundation. His advice to businesses: "Companies should plan around the tariffs that exist today rather than assume they will be quickly reversed or modified."
Resolving these legal challenges will be a lengthy process as they move through the courts. Kimberly Clausing puts it plainly: "One can never be certain" how the courts will rule.
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