The tariff will be “over and above our normal tariffs already being charged,” Trump said in a media briefing.

“The Supreme Court did not overrule tariffs. They merely overruled a particular use of IEEPA for tariffs.”

Trump said his administration would also launch several investigations “to protect our country from unfair trading practices of other countries and companies.”

WHY IT MATTERS: While Canadian agricultural goods largely escaped tariffs under the CUSMA trade agreement, U.S. President Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs created significant uncertainty.

Trump signed an executive order later Friday imposing a 10 per cent ad valorem tariff to take effect on articles imported into the U.S. starting Tuesday (Feb. 24).

Section 122 allows the president to impose duties up to 15 per cent or quotas for up to 150 days, the Retail Industry Leaders Association explained in a post.

“Specifically, Section 122 allows the President to impose duties of up to 15 per cent or quotas for up to 150 days on imports from all countries, or selectively against countries that maintain unjustifiable or unreasonable restrictions on U.S. commerce.”

The new 10 per cent tariff will not be imposed on any CUSMA-compliant “goods of Canada and Mexico,” the White House said in a fact sheet later Friday.

Nor will it be imposed on “certain agricultural products, including beef, tomatoes, and oranges.”

Other imports exempt from the new tariff will include “natural resources and fertilizers that cannot be grown, mined, or otherwise produced in the United States or grown, mined, or otherwise produced in sufficient quantities to meet domestic demand” as well as “certain critical minerals, metals used in currency and bullion, energy and energy products.”

Among other specific goods, pharmaceuticals and electronics, it will also not apply to “passenger vehicles, certain light trucks, certain medium and heavy-duty vehicles, buses, and certain parts of passenger vehicles, light trucks, heavy-duty vehicles and buses.”

Trump on Friday separately announced the continued suspension, first imposed on Feb. 1 last year, of duty-free de minimis treatment for low-value shipments, including goods shipped through the international postal system. Those goods will also be subject to the new 10 per cent tariff.

In a separate social media post Saturday (Feb. 21), Trump said he would instead set his new Section 122 tariff “effective immediately” at “the fully allowed, and legally tested, 15 per cent level,” but as of Sunday (Feb. 22) had not yet issued a new or updated proclamation or executive order to that effect.

Canadian groups react

Canadian Federation of Agriculture president Keith Currie told Glacier FarmMedia in a text that he hoped the Supreme Court’s decision would bring back some stability to cross-border trade. However, he noted that we’d have to wait and see what other tools the Trump administration utilizes.

“Obviously this court decision supports what we’ve been saying about the tariffs not being justified,” Currie said.

“Today’s Supreme Court ruling that the IEEPA tariffs are unlawful is welcome news for equipment manufacturers, which have spent the last year navigating higher input costs and mounting trade uncertainty,” said Kip Eideberg, senior vice-president of industry and government relations for the Association of Equipment Manufacturers, in a statement.

“What equipment manufacturers need most is certainty so they can make long-term decisions that benefit their workers, their customers, and the broader economy.”

Following Trump’s vow to impose other tariffs, the Association of Equipment Manufacturers reiterated equipment manufacturers’ need for certainty while making longterm decisions.

The justices, in a 6-3 ruling authored by conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, upheld a lower court’s decision that the Republican president’s use of this 1977 law exceeded his authority.

Trump says he’s “ashamed” of SCOTUS members

Trump, in comments at the White House, condemned the ruling as “terrible” and lashed out at the six justices who ruled against him.

“I’m ashamed of certain members of the court – absolutely ashamed – for not having the courage to do what’s right for our country,” Trump said.

Trump has leveraged tariffs – taxes on imported goods – as a key economic and foreign policy tool.

“Our task today is to decide only whether the power to “regulate … importation,” as granted to the president in IEEPA, embraces the power to impose tariffs. It does not,” Roberts wrote in the ruling, quoting the statute’s text that Trump claimed had justified his sweeping tariffs.

The U.S. Constitution grants Congress, not the president, the authority to issue taxes and tariffs.

Tariffs have been central to a global trade war that Trump initiated after he began his second term as president, one that has alienated trading partners, affected financial markets and caused global economic uncertainty.

Trump has called his tariffs vital for U.S. economic security, predicting that the country would be defenseless and ruined without them.

“Foreign countries that have been ripping us off for years are ecstatic,” Trump said on Friday. “They’re so happy, and they’re dancing in the streets, but they won’t be dancing for long that, I can assure you.”

The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, had allowed Trump’s expansive exertion of presidential powers in other areas in a series of rulings issued on an emergency basis, and Friday’s ruling represented the biggest setback it has dealt him since he returned to office in January 2025.

“It’s my opinion that the court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think,” Trump said.

“He cannot”

Roberts, citing a prior Supreme Court ruling, wrote that “the president must ‘point to clear congressional authorization’ to justify his extraordinary assertion of the power to impose tariffs,” adding: “He cannot.”

Trump has leveraged tariffs – taxes on imported goods – as a key economic and foreign policy tool. They have been central to a global trade war that Trump initiated after he began his second term as president, one that has alienated trading partners, affected financial markets and caused global economic uncertainty.

The Supreme Court reached its conclusion in a legal challenge by businesses affected by the tariffs and 12 U.S. states, most of them Democratic-governed, against Trump’s unprecedented use of this law to unilaterally impose the import taxes.

Trump’s tariffs were forecast to generate over the next decade trillions of dollars in revenue for the United States, which possesses the world’s largest economy.

Tariffs will likely need to be refunded

Trump’s administration has not provided tariffs collection data since December 14. But Penn-Wharton Budget Model economists estimated on Friday that the amount collected in Trump’s tariffs based on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act stood at more than $175 billion (C$239.4 billion). And that amount likely would need to be refunded with a Supreme Court ruling against the IEEPA-based tariffs.

The U.S. Constitution grants Congress, not the president, the authority to issue taxes and tariffs. But Trump instead turned to a statutory authority by invoking IEEPA to impose the tariffs on nearly every U.S. trading partner without the approval of Congress. Trump has imposed some additional tariffs under other laws that are not at issue in this case. Based on government data from October to mid-December, those represent about third of the revenue from Trump-imposed tariffs.

IEEPA lets a president regulate commerce in a national emergency. Trump became the first president to use IEEPA to impose tariffs, one of the many ways he has aggressively pushed the boundaries of executive authority since he returned to office in areas as varied as his crackdown on immigration, the firing of federal agency officials, domestic military deployments and military operations overseas.

Trump described the tariffs as vital for U.S. economic security, predicting that the country would be defenseless and ruined without them. Trump in November told reporters that without his tariffs “the rest of the world would laugh at us because they’ve used tariffs against us for years and took advantage of us.” Trump said the United States was abused by other countries including China, the second-largest economy.

U.S. could invoke other legal justifications: Bessent

After the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case in November, Trump said he would consider alternatives if it ruled against him on tariffs, telling reporters that “we’ll have to develop a ‘game two’ plan.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other administration officials said the United States would invoke other legal justifications to retain as many of Trump’s tariffs as possible. Among others, these include a statutory provision that permits tariffs on imported goods that threaten U.S. national security and another that allows retaliatory actions including tariffs against trading partners that the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative determines have used unfair trade practices against American exporters.

None of these alternatives offered the flexibility and blunt-force dynamics that IEEPA provided Trump, and may not be able to replicate the full scope of his tariffs in a timely fashion.

Trump’s ability to impose tariffs instantaneously on any trading partner’s goods under the aegis of some form of declared national emergency raised his leverage over other countries. It brought world leaders scrambling to Washington to secure trade deals that often included pledges of billions of dollars in investments or other offers of enhanced market access for U.S. companies.

But Trump’s use of tariffs as a cudgel in U.S. foreign policy has succeeded in antagonizing numerous countries, including those long considered among the closest U.S. allies.

IEEPA historically had been used for imposing sanctions on enemies or freezing their assets, not to impose tariffs. The law does not specifically mention the word tariffs. Trump’s Justice Department had argued that IEEPA allows tariffs by authorizing the president to “regulate” imports to address emergencies.

Tariffs generated $195 billion

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that if all current tariffs stay in place, including the IEEPA-based duties, they would generate about $300 billion annually over the next decade.

Total U.S. net customs duty receipts reached a record $195 billion (C$266.8 billion) in fiscal 2025, which ended on September 30, according to U.S. Treasury Department data.

On April 2 on a date Trump labeled “Liberation Day,” the president announced what he called “reciprocal” tariffs on goods imported from most U.S. trading partners, invoking IEEPA to address what he called a national emergency related to U.S. trade deficits, though the United States already had run trade deficits for decades.

In February and March of 2025, Trump invoked IEEPA to impose tariffs on China, Canada and Mexico, citing the trafficking of the often-abused painkiller fentanyl and illicit drugs into the United States as a national emergency.

Trump has wielded his tariffs to extract concessions and renegotiate trade deals, and as a weapon to punish countries that draw his ire on non-trade political matters. These have ranged from Brazil’s prosecution of former president Jair Bolsonaro, India’s purchases of Russian oil that help fund Russia’s war in Ukraine, and an anti-tariffs ad by Canada’s Ontario province.

IEEPA was passed by Congress and signed by Democratic President Jimmy Carter. In passing the measure, Congress placed additional limits on the president’s authority compared to a predecessor law.

The cases on tariffs before the justices involved three lawsuits.

The Washington-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit sided with five small businesses that import goods in one challenge, and the states of Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Vermont in another.

Separately, a Washington-based federal judge sided with a family-owned toy company called Learning Resources.

— Additional reporting by David Lawder and John Kruzel. With files from Jonah Grignon and Geralyn Wichers.

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The justices voted 5-4 to uphold a lower court’s dismissal of a lawsuit by the National Pork Producers Council and the American Farm Bureau Federation seeking to invalidate the law, but they were divided in their reasons for doing so.

The industry had argued that the measure violated a U.S. Constitution provision called the Commerce Clause that courts have interpreted as empowering the federal government – not states – to regulate interstate commerce.

“While the Constitution addresses many weighty issues, the type of pork chops California merchants may sell is not on that list,” wrote conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, who authored the court’s main opinion.

The measure, approved by voters as a 2018 ballot initiative called Proposition 12, bars sales in California of pork, veal and eggs from animals whose confinement failed to meet certain minimum space requirements.

The law mandates pig confinement spaces large enough to enable the animals to turn around, lie down, stand up and extend their limbs.

The pork industry groups argued that the law violated the Constitution by forcing farmers in other states to change their practices in order to sell pork in California, a lucrative market. The Canadian Pork Council signed onto an amicus argument filed last June in support of the U.S. pork groups.

Kitty Block, CEO of the Humane Society of the United States, praised the ruling.

“We won’t stop fighting until the pork industry ends its cruel, reckless practice of confining mother pigs in cages so small they can’t even turn around. It’s astonishing that pork industry leaders would waste so much time and money on fighting this commonsense step to prevent products of relentless, unbearable animal suffering from being sold in California,” said Block, whose group intervened in the case to defend Proposition 12.

Scott Hays, president of the National Pork Producers Council and a Missouri pork producer, voiced disappointment with the Supreme Court’s decision.

“Allowing state overreach will increase prices for consumers and drive small farms out of business, leading to more consolidation,” Hays said.

Seaboard Corp., the third-biggest U.S. pig producer, is prepared to supply California customers with “limited supplies of compliant pork” starting on July 1, company spokesperson David Eaheart said.

The company, which runs Seaboard Foods, converted a portion of its farms and plant operations to meet California’s requirements before the Supreme Court’s decision, Eaheart said.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a partial dissent that was joined by fellow conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh, as well as liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. The four said they would have allowed the challengers to the California law to pursue their claim in the lower courts.

“In my view, petitioners plausibly allege a substantial burden against interstate commerce,” Roberts wrote.

California farms collectively are only a small part of the US$26 billion-a-year U.S. pork industry. The size of cages used at U.S. pig farms is humane and necessary for animal safety, according to the industry, which asserts that California’s law gives the state unwarranted influence over the pork sector.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration sided with the pork producers in the case, saying that states cannot ban products that pose no threat to public health or safety due to philosophical objections.

Proposition 12 set the required space for breeding pigs, or sows, at 24 square feet. The current industry standard is between 14 and 20 square feet, according to a 2021 report from Dutch banking and financial services company Rabobank.

The Supreme Court took up the case after the San Francisco-based Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a judge’s decision to throw out the pork industry challenge.

— Reporting for Reuters by Nate Raymond in Boston and Andrew Chung in New York; additional reporting John Kruzel in Washington and Tom Polansek in Chicago.

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The justices overturned a lower court decision that had faulted the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for giving refineries in Wyoming, Utah and Oklahoma extensions on waivers from renewable fuel standard (RFS) requirements under a law called the Clean Air Act even though the companies’ prior exemptions had expired.

The extensions at issue were given to units of HollyFrontier Corp and CVR Energy.

The 6-3 ruling, authored by conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, compared these extensions to ones granted in everyday life such as to a student wanting more time to complete a term paper even though the deadline has passed or a business contract whose term had expired.

“It is entirely natural — and consistent with ordinary usage — to seek an ‘extension’ of time even after some time lapse,” Gorsuch said.

In a dissent, conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined by liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, faulted the ruling’s interpretation of the word “extend.” The “EPA cannot ‘extend’ an exemption that a refinery no longer has,” Barrett wrote.

President Joe Biden’s administration has been considering ways to provide relief to U.S. oil refiners from biofuel blending mandates.

The case reflected a long-running dispute between the oil and corn industries. The legal battle focused on changes made in 2005 and 2007 to the Clean Air Act to require biofuel quotas in U.S. gasoline and diesel products — intended to reduce dependence on foreign oil and support fossil fuel alternatives.

Under the program, refiners must blend billions of gallons of biofuels such as ethanol into their fuel or buy compliance credits, known as RINs, from those that do.

U.S. renewable fuel credits fell on the news, trading at $1.55 each, down from $1.65 each on Thursday (all figures US$). U.S. gasoline and diesel futures plunged about three per cent immediately following the news, but later eased losses.

States backing the refineries included Wyoming. Those backing biofuels included Iowa. Both sides cited economic threats to their rural economies posed by the litigation.

HollyFrontier Corp said in a statement, “We are pleased that our longstanding arguments were today validated by the Supreme Court.” HollyFrontier urged the EPA to “immediately take action to make the RFS a workable program for U.S. refiners and consumers.”

American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers president Chet Thompson said the renewable fuel standard “is hurting consumers and jeopardizing the viability of refineries across the country, as well as the jobs and communities they support.”

Biofuel and corn producer groups that challenged the waivers, including the Renewable Fuels Association and the National Corn Growers Association, said in a statement they were “extremely disappointed in this unfortunate decision from the Supreme Court.”

Noting that because the lower court had faulted the EPA’s decision on other grounds as well, the groups said they were optimistic that Biden’s administration and the EPA would “take a far more judicious and responsible approach to the refinery exemption program than their predecessors did.”

Renewable fuel groups said that an increase in waivers during former president Donald Trump’s administration had undercut the demand for their products by billions of dollars.

Small refineries were exempt until 2011 to account for any “disproportionate economic hardship” they would endure by complying with volume requirements for ethanol and other biofuels. But the EPA was allowed to extend those exemptions for certain periods.

At issue in the case was whether the EPA impermissibly exempted units of HollyFrontier and CVR in 2017 and 2018 when they had not received continuous prior extensions of an initial exemption.

The Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year found that the EPA had exceeded its authority “because there was nothing for the agency to ‘extend.'”

— Reporting for Reuters by Andrew Chung in New York; additional reporting by Stephanie Kelly.

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Conagra had asked to the justices to hear its appeal of a lower court ruling allowing the suit to proceed despite difficulties in determining who should be included and excluded in the litigation, a problem often encountered in disputes over low-cost products.

In 2015, a federal judge in California let purchasers of Wesson brand oil in 11 U.S. states proceed with their claims in a consolidated case, rejecting Conagra’s argument that there was no reliable way to identify those who had bought the oil over the last decade. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld that ruling in January, and the company appealed to the Supreme Court.

The purchasers, including lead plaintiff Robert Briseno, a California resident who sued Conagra in 2011, allege the Chicago-based packaged food maker used deceptive labeling dating back to 2007, calling the cooking oil “100 per cent Natural” despite its GMO content, banking on consumers’ willingness to pay more for natural products.

Conagra said that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not defined the term “natural” and that it means different things to different people.

The company, supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers business groups, argued that consumers rarely save every receipt and cannot typically recall trivial purchases from years ago. Manufacturers, distributors and retailers generally do not keep such records either, it said.

The plaintiffs told the Supreme Court that companies like Conagra simply want to place class actions out of reach for low-priced consumer goods, which individuals are unlikely to sue over on their own. Their motive is to “enable companies to commit wide-scale, but low value, harm to individual consumers with impunity,” they told the justices in a legal brief.

— Andrew Chung is a Reuters correspondent based in New York.

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