New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez on Wednesday signed on to a letter with 17 other attorneys general asking Congress to pass a law that would issue refunds to Americans over President Donald Trump’s “illegal tariffs.”
The U.S. Supreme Court in February ruled that Trump’s tariffs, enacted under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, were illegal. American consumers and businesses paid an estimated $166 billion as a result of the tariffs, the coalition of AGs argued in the Wednesday letter to majority and minority leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate.
“Congress must act quickly to establish a fair, automatic refund system so that New Mexico small businesses and working families aren’t forced to navigate complex and costly processes just to recover money they never should have been charged in the first place,” Torrez said in a Wednesday statement. “Households in every corner of our state have been burdened by President Trump’s illegal tariffs, hitting low-income families the hardest and straining budgets that were already stretched thin.”
The letter Torrez co-signed along with AGs from New York, California, Arizona and more estimates that 330,000 American businesses and citizens paid the price for Trump’s tariffs. A report from Yale University’s Budget Lab indicates that Americans fronted the cost of 76% of tariff costs in the form of price increases.
“Small businesses and low-income households have been disproportionately burdened by the tariffs, which raised prices on groceries, clothing, household items, and machinery and equipment,” the letter says. “We urge you to take action to protect businesses and consumers and ensure that they swiftly receive the compensation to which they are entitled following the Supreme Court’s decision.”
Like many state AGs across the nation, Torrez has spent much of the past year engaged in litigation against Trump’s White House. He previously told Source NM he meets with other elected attorneys general multiple times a week to discuss federal policies that could negatively impact their states.
“My job is to fundamentally protect the people in this state,” he said in a December interview. “None of the institutions in our government have been built to respond and react to the scale and speed of the destruction that’s being wrought by the Trump administration.”
