A decades-old American food importing business is taking the Trump White House to court again over unilateral tariffs imposed on billions of dollars worth of Canadian goods, marking the fourth high-profile legal challenge to the administration’s aggressive trade policy by a conservative public interest law firm that has already defeated one set of sweeping levies.
The legal action comes after trade negotiations between Washington and Ottawa collapsed in August, prompting the Trump administration to implement a 50% tariff on roughly $20 billion in Canadian imports. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney responded with a dollar-for-dollar retaliatory tariff matching the U.S. duties, targeting American goods including domestically produced cheese that Gellert Global Group, the plaintiff in the new case, sells to Canadian customers.
Headquartered in New Jersey, Gellert Global Group is a third-generation family-owned food industry firm that now faces double punishment from the transatlantic trade dispute: it pays the new 50% levy on Canadian cheese it brings into the United States, while also absorbing retaliatory Canadian tariffs on the U.S.-made cheese it exports to the north. In a statement Tuesday, co-chief executive Thomas Gellert emphasized that the company has spent decades cultivating trusted cross-border relationships with producers and customers, relationships that have been upended suddenly by the new levies. “These tariffs disrupt those relationships overnight and create costs and uncertainty that ripple through the entire supply chain,” Gellert said.
Representing Gellert Global Group is the Liberty Justice Center, the same legal organization that successfully sued to block the Trump administration’s earlier “liberation day” import tariffs earlier this year. The new challenge was filed with the U.S. Court of International Trade, where attorneys are asking the court to rule the new Canadian tariffs unlawful, order the government to issue full refunds with accrued interest to affected importers, and block the collection of the duties immediately through a preliminary injunction.
At the heart of the legal fight is the Trump administration’s reliance on Section 338 of the 1930 Tariff Act, a nearly century-old provision designed to protect U.S. businesses from discriminatory trade practices by foreign governments. Attorneys for the Liberty Justice Center argue that this dormant provision does not grant the executive branch blanket authority to impose economy-wide tariffs whenever a bilateral trade dispute emerges. They also note that Section 338 requires a mandatory 30-day waiting period before new levies can take effect, but the administration added cheese and other goods to the tariff list just one week before collection began, violating this statutory requirement.
Further, the lawsuit argues that Section 338 has effectively been superseded by Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, which sets out modern processes for addressing unfair foreign trade practices. Even if the 1930 provision were still valid, the administration failed to meet the legal threshold required to justify sweeping tariffs against Canada, the suit says. The case also challenges the administration’s justification for the levies, which relies on Canada’s retaliatory tariffs to trigger Section 338 protections. Sara Albrecht, chief executive of the Liberty Justice Center, stressed that the challenge is not a personal attack on former President Trump, but a defense of constitutional separation of powers. “No president should have the power to pull a dormant statute off the shelf and use it to impose sweeping tariffs or import bans without the limits Congress required,” Albrecht said. She added that the core principle uniting all of the Liberty Justice Center’s challenges to Trump’s tariffs is clear: the U.S. Constitution explicitly grants the power to set tariffs to Congress, not the executive branch. “The executive branch cannot keep moving the same policy from one statute to another and pretend the limits disappear,” Albrecht said.
This marks the fourth tariff-related lawsuit the Liberty Justice Center has brought against the Trump administration, including its successful February 2025 challenge to tariffs implemented under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which were ultimately struck down by the courts. The White House has not yet issued a public response to requests for comment on the new lawsuit. The legal challenge comes as the trade conflict between the U.S. and Canada escalates, with Trump sharing an AI-generated meme related to the trade dispute as analysts assess how much retaliatory pressure Canada can bring to bear on U.S. trade policy.