California filed two lawsuits against the Trump administration Monday — one to block President Trump’s latest round of tariffs on international trading partners, the other to block his administration from sharing needy families’ personal data with immigration officials.
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, whose office brought the lawsuits alongside other Democratically led states, said they were both intended to rein in a lawless president pushing policies that threaten American families already struggling to afford basic necessities.
Bonta said the new tariffs are part of a “failed and illegal economic policy” that has previously been blocked in court. He alleged that the proposed data sharing was part of a broader and illegal “mass surveillance effort” by the Trump administration to target its political opponents.
The White House has previously defended both tariffs and data-sharing policies as part of Trump’s “America first” agenda to improve the economic standing of American families.
In separate statements to The Times, it defended the new tariffs as a legitimate means of combating forced labor in international markets, which it alleged is having a negative impact on the U.S., and dismissed the data-sharing challenge as an effort by Democrats to protect undocumented immigrants over American families.
Trump has previously defended his tariffs, including a prior set that was ruled illegal by the U.S. Supreme Court, as necessary to fix years of unfair trading practices in which international partners took advantage of the U.S. However, many economists have determined that the cost of the tariffs are being passed on to U.S. consumers and contributing to the persistent inflation causing economic pain nationwide.
Trump, the White House and top officials in his administration have also previously defended the sharing of personal data among U.S. agencies, and from individual states to the federal government, as a commonsense way to reduce waste and fraud and to identify and remove people who are in the country illegally and consuming benefits intended for American families.
The administration has previously sought the personal data of Medicaid recipients, SNAP food assistance recipients, immigrants who have filed taxes with the Internal Revenue Service and registered voters in states across the country. All of those demands have also been challenged in court, with varying degrees of success.
Bonta’s office has now filed 82 lawsuits against the current Trump administration.
Tariff lawsuit
Trump’s latest tariffs, levies of between 10% and 12.5%, took effect late last month and apply to more than 80 countries, including some of the closest U.S. allies and largest trading partners such as Canada, Mexico and the European Union. They followed a Trump administration announcement of new 50% tariffs on many Canadian products, set to go into effect this month.
“Tariffs are taxes, and the American people cannot and should not shoulder the extra costs that come from the president’s failed and illegal economic policy — no matter how much the president wants them to,” Bonta said in announcing the lawsuit in the U.S. Court of International Trade.
Two previous attempts by the Trump administration to unilaterally levy tariffs on trading partners were rejected by the courts in the face of similar legal challenges by California and other states. In February, the Supreme Court rejected a sweeping slate of tariffs Trump had imposed on an emergency basis. In May, the Court of International Trade turned back another set.
The Trump administration has said the president’s latest tariffs are authorized by a separate law not considered in the previous litigation — one related to combating forced labor in global trade.
Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, told The Times on Monday that the new tariffs were a “legally durable tool” to eliminate “unreasonable acts, policies and practices that burden U.S. commerce.”
“A foreign country’s failure to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor is unreasonable and burdens U.S. commerce, including American workers, and must be addressed,” Desai said.
The states’ lawsuit argued that the reliance on labor law was simply a “guise” used by Trump to impose new tariffs, and that “there is no rational fit between the purported problem of forced labor in international supply chains and the blanket global tariffs” imposed.
Bonta brought the case alongside the attorneys general or governors of 24 other states.
Data-sharing lawsuit
California joined a similar coalition of Democrat-led states to file a lawsuit challenging the sharing of needy families’ data, in federal court in Washington, D.C.
The lawsuit challenges a notice the Trump administration issued last month announcing the Administration of Children and Families would begin sharing the personal information of recipients in the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program to outside agencies — including with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which houses Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other immigration enforcement units.
A spokesperson for the Administration for Children and Families said it does not comment on ongoing litigation.
Desai said that “Democrats are once again admitting that their top priority is ensuring illegal immigrants can receive taxpayer-funded benefits meant for American citizens,” and that the Trump administration “will continue to protect and preserve these key federal programs for American citizens.”
The program provides $16 billion in grants annually to the states, which use it to provide cash assistance to low-income families. Some 350,000 families in California receive support through the program each month, Bonta’s office said.
Bonta said the sharing of program data with Homeland Security would be a clear violation of the law establishing the fund.
“The Trump Administration is exploiting a program designed to ensure children do not go hungry and to help needy families get back on their feet in order to fuel its mass surveillance effort. It’s cruel, unnecessary, and illegal,” Bonta said in a statement.
During a morning news conference, Bonta said one of his concerns is that immigration officials will use data to target the undocumented parents of U.S. citizen children who are legitimately receiving assistance through the program.
“They’re seeking Social Security information, marital status, income information,” he said. “We think that they might be interested in that information to potentially target parents.”
He said he also believes the data sharing is part of a much broader effort by the Trump administration to gather up as much data as possible in order to target individuals who do not conform with the administration’s political agenda, including on immigration policy and on issues such as abortion and gender-affirming care.
“While the Trump Administration continues to break the law in order to amass an ever-greater trove of people’s personal information, we’ll continue stepping in to protect the privacy of our people,” Bonta said.
The lawsuit is just the latest in a much broader legal war over the Trump administration’s drive to force all kinds of federal and state social services and financial programs to share the personal data of benefit recipients and other program users.
California is fighting alongside other states in court to block the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from sharing personal data of Medicaid recipients with Homeland Security, though some of that data have already been shared.
California is also fighting alongside other states in court to block the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s demand that states turn over the personal data of millions of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, recipients. The demand came with a threat from USDA that it would cut off funding to states that don’t comply. Courts have blocked the suspension of funds, but some data have been shared.
Immigrant rights groups, including Los Angeles-based Inclusive Action for the City, are also suing to block a Trump administration plan to share IRS taxpayer data with Homeland Security. The Trump administration has said the data sharing would be used to target only criminals, but immigrant rights advocates have denounced it as an attempt to do just the opposite — to target immigrants who have been in the country and paid taxes for years.
