Dan Rayfield
Role at the time: Oregon attorney general, whose office co-led with Arizona and California the complaint for 25 plaintiffs (23 states and the governors of Kentucky and Pennsylvania); the words are the complaint's, filed by the plaintiff states, not a personal statement
Response to this claim
Oregon, Arizona and California, leading the 25 plaintiffs in State of Oregon et al. v. Trump, said in their August 3, 2026 complaint that USTR did not make the country-specific findings Section 301 requires: it investigated 60 economies in about two and a half months, tied the 10% and 12.5% rates to no measured level of forced-labor imports, and left no way for an economy to escape the tariffs.
“The Plaintiff States oppose forced labor in all its forms and support protections for workers around the globe. But the Administration cannot use forced labor as a pretext to continue its illegal tariff scheme. The tariffs the USTR imposed are so broad that they defy the USTR's own stated aims and make a mockery of the statute used to justify them.”
The complaint of 25 plaintiffs (23 states and the governors of Kentucky and Pennsylvania). It alleges the tariff action is arbitrary, capricious and contrary to law, that the 60 investigations were completed in a fraction of the time such investigations usually take, and that the administration's own statements show the investigation was planned to continue the earlier tariffs. Under the court's August 19 order the states' case is stayed behind the Learning Resources sample case.
Archived copy (opens in a new tab)Why we used this label
Relative to the Section 301 forced-labor tariffs, the states reject them as a pretext and as contrary to law, which meets the label's test. The closest competing label is Mixed or conditional, because they say they oppose forced labor, but they place no condition on their challenge.