The Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced a new Trade Fraud Task Force with broad civil and criminal authority to enforce tariffs and customs regulations. The initiative, announced on August 29, 2025, consolidates enforcement resources across DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
This move is the latest development in the second Trump administration’s prioritization of trade enforcement. It follows the DOJ Criminal Division’s May 2025 guidance, “Focus, Fairness, and Efficiency in the Fight Against White-Collar Crime,” which identified trade and customs fraud among its “high-impact” enforcement priorities. DOJ also revised its Corporate Whistleblowers Awards Pilot Program to include “trade, tariff, and customs fraud” as an eligible claim topic.
The task force aims to “bring robust enforcement against importers and other parties who seek to defraud the United States.” It will combine and leverage existing elements of DOJ and DHS to “aggressively pursue enforcement actions against any parties who seek to evade tariffs and other duties, as well as smugglers who seek to import prohibited goods into the American economy.” In addition to imposing new and heightened tariffs on various countries and goods, the administration is increasing the scale and power of its enforcement mechanisms to encourage compliance.
Prior to the task force’s creation, responsibility for enforcing customs regulations was divided among several federal agencies, including various entities within the DOJ and both Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations within DHS. By concentrating their power into a strategic, focused task force, these entities will have direct and established methods of information-sharing and synchronization within a single unit under centralized leadership, thus increasing power and efficiency. The task force, which will focus exclusively on tariff and trade violations, will leverage the power of these previously disparate entities to bring civil and criminal enforcement actions against any company or individual that tries to circumvent trade regulations.
The DOJ identified three enforcement mechanisms it anticipates the task force will use:
While the first two enforcement devices have existed for decades, the task force is expected to use them with new vigor to enforce the administration’s customs priorities.
The FCA’s targeted use as a tariff-enforcement tool is a new development. In a June 2025 case involving a pipe importer that allegedly made false statements to customs to avoid paying tariffs, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the use of the FCA for customs enforcement. The FCA prohibits fraud against the government, including fraudulent acts made with actual knowledge and acts involving deliberate ignorance or reckless disregard of the truth or falsity of information. The FCA encourages private individuals to file lawsuits known as “qui tam” lawsuits on behalf of the government to combat alleged fraud. Individuals whose qui tam lawsuits succeed may receive 15–30% of any amount recovered as a reward. The FCA also carries heavy penalties that include both civil fines per violation plus treble damages.
Essentially, the DOJ now has a dedicated unit enforcing tariffs exercising FCA’s broad powers in addition to traditional enforcement means. And individual qui tam actions by persons motivated for a reward will bolster the unit’s efforts, creating increased risk for companies involved in international trade.
In the first Trump administration, companies could avail themselves of exclusion processes under § 301 and § 232 of the Trade Act to mitigate the new tariffs’ impact. But such exclusion processes have not been available in the most recent rounds of tariffs. Instead, the administration has taken a holistic approach to customs regulations with limited to no exceptions and broad applicability to global trading partners across all sectors. This leaves companies with limited options: pay the tariffs or reshore. The task force’s creation signals both limited exceptions and directed enforcement of the administration’s trade regulations.
One way companies have limited the tariffs’ impact is through legal challenges. On the day the task force was announced, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held unlawful the administration’s use of the IEEPA to impose sweeping global tariffs. The Federal Circuit put its own decision on hold to give the Trump administration time to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court. The fate of the administration’s “reciprocal” tariffs (and others issued pursuant to IEEPA) is now in the hands of the Supreme Court, which announced on September 9, 2025, that it will take up the case on an expedited briefing schedule and hear arguments in the first week of November. Given the expedited briefing and argument, the Supreme Court will likely issue its opinion at the end of 2025 or the beginning of 2026. There may be an opportunity to recuperate IEEPA tariffs depending on the outcome of this case.