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Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature written by a bunch of people at the Institute for Justice.

New Case Alert! Before dawn, Cathy George awakes to a squad of heavily armed officers banging on the door to her Georgia home and aiming rifles at her. They’re looking for a fugitive. Yikes! Problem 1: The fugitive was arrested months earlier—in Indiana—and remains behind bars. Problem 2: He had no connection to Cathy. Now, represented by IJ, Cathy is suing over the raid, because when officers screw up that badly, the Constitution promises more accountability than “oops, we made a mistake.” Read more here.

New on the Bound By Oath podcast: A history of Rooker-Feldman, a slightly treasonous doctrine that we hope SCOTUS is going to blow to smithereens next week.

1. D.C. Circuit (over a dissent): We have exclusive jurisdiction over challenges to final TSA decisions refusing to take somebody off the No Fly List, which means that the district court wasn’t allowed to hear this guy’s lawsuit demanding to be taken off of the Terrorist Watchlist, since taking him off the Terrorist Watchlist would necessarily take him off the No Fly List. Instead, his only remedy is to file a petition asking us to overturn the TSA’s final order and take him off the No Fly List.
2. D.C. Circuit (same day): Also, we’re denying that same guy’s petition asking us to overturn the TSA’s final order and take him off the No Fly List.
3. Many have been following the escalating tensions between the feds and courts about the former’s efforts to remove members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to El Salvador. Well, the D.C. Circuit has now mandamus-ed a second time. The newest “extraordinary remedy” puts an end to the criminal contempt proceedings, deeming it unnecessary as the district court already knows who ordered the planes to depart (Kristi Noem) and the TRO language cannot support criminal contempt charges. Concurrence: Slicing and dicing the Saturday evening emergency hearing transcript and the subsequent order shows why the feds didn’t violate the order in the first place. Dissent: “Contempt of court is a public offense, and the fate of our democratic republic will depend on whether we treat it as such.”
4. Cops in Canóvanas, Puerto Rico, spy youths potentially dealing drugs. Upon confrontation, the youths flee. One cop shoots a 17-year-old in the back. Another allegedly pistol whips him. Later the cops falsify reports. But word gets out, feds prosecute, and convictions follow. First Circuit: The pistol-whipper should have been able to cross-examine the whippee. Vacated and remanded on that count (but not three others).
5. Circuit split alert! The First Circuit (splitting with the Tenth) holds that Maine’s law requiring a firearm seller to wait at least 72 hours before delivering a purchased firearm doesn’t infringe the right to “keep” or “bear” arms because the purchaser remains free to “keep” and “bear” them three days after buying them.
6. Second Circuit (unpublished): The Supreme Court’s decision in Bruen tells us the Second Amendment extends to weapons in common use for self-defense, but whether a weapon is in common use seems like the kind of thing you should have tried to prove at summary judgment, not the kind of thing you should be trying to prove by citing stuff to us in your appellate briefs.
7. The Fourth Circuit (en banc) vacates a preliminary injunction that had prevented DOGE staffers from accessing confidential Social Security data and in so doing manages to generate six different opinions fighting about everything from whether the Supreme Court’s unexplained emergency-docket orders count as “precedent” to whether preliminary-injunction opinions should look more like word problems from your junior-high math class, all of which is really extremely fun reading for the really extremely small group of people who like that sort of thing.
8. Plaintiff: Sure, the case law says school officials have leeway to search students’ belongings, but you can’t apply that pre-digital precedent to the much more intrusive search of a teenage student’s cell phone (on which the assistant principal found an explicit photo of a different teenager). Fourth Circuit: That’s a real interesting argument you’ve got there; it’s a shame you’ve waived it. Also, you’re wrong.
9. Before searching for the names of a Supreme Court justice in a hospital database and then posting the results online, you might want to read this tale of caution from the Fourth Circuit, which ends with a 24-month visit to federal prison.
10. Fairfax County, Va. police arrange a controlled drug buy in the parking lot of a shopping complex. Once the target arrives, he becomes suspicious and begins to drive away. A half dozen detectives pursue him in unmarked vehicles, ram his car, block him in it, and shoot him. (They feared that he was reaching for a gun; he was unarmed.) District court: reasonable response, no excessive force here. Fourth Circuit: Not so fast. The man was driving slowly out of a parking lot, posing no danger to anybody; police hadn’t even given him a chance to pull over first; and there’s a dispute over whether he reached for his console. Try again.
11. The rara avis case in which a court of appeals (here, the Fifth Circuit) uncovers a reversible error in an Anders appeal. Concurrence: This means the “party-presentation principle” is totally bunk and shouldn’t apply in any context ever, right? Right?
12. No American has been able to legally distill consumable spirits at home since 1868. That ends now, says the Fifth Circuit, as the law violates the Constitution’s Taxation and Necessary and Proper Clauses. (On appeal, the feds didn’t challenge the district court’s conclusion that the law also violates the Commerce Clause, so Wickard lives to fight another hay.) Let the fun be-gin.
13. Most criminal defendants try to avoid being sentenced under the Armed Career Criminal Act, which sets a 15-year mandatory minimum for certain defendants if they have three previous convictions for certain qualifying offenses. Defendant: In the district court, I pleaded guilty and accidentally agreed that I had three qualifying offenses. But on reflection, I had only two! So my 212-month sentence is a mistake. Sixth Circuit: You and your lawyer should’ve been more careful. Sentence affirmed. Dissent: This seems like an error we should correct.
14. As part of their investigation into an online collection of sexually explicit images of local underage girls, cops in Toulon, Ill., send a link to the files to their IT guy, for help in identifying the victims. He does. Huzzah! But turns out he’s a collector of child sexual-abuse material in his own right. Yikes! And he keeps the photos and distributes them. Double yikes. Seventh Circuit: This whole situation seems to have been pretty shambolic, but the victims don’t have a due-process claim against the cops who gave the IT guy access to their photos. (The guy is now serving a 35-year prison sentence, and claims against him personally are proceeding in the district court.)
15. Find someone who loves you as much as the Seventh Circuit loves excoriating lawyers for inaccurately certifying the completeness of the short appendix required by Circuit Rule 30.
16. The key to a life well lived is to find a hobby that you relish as much as the Seventh Circuit relishes castigating lawyers for inaccurately certifying the completeness of the short appendix required by Circuit Rule 30.
17. Milwaukee man is convicted of kidnapping and sexual assault after a bailiff improperly tells the jury they’re not allowed to deadlock. The conviction is overturned, and the man sues both the loose-lipped bailiff and another bailiff who heard the remark but didn’t intervene. Seventh Circuit: We don’t have jurisdiction to decide if the bystander bailiff gets qualified immunity because the district court didn’t make a definitive ruling. Dissent: All we need to know is that the district court didn’t grant immunity, and here the plaintiff didn’t even try to meet his burden to overcome it.
18. Courts across the country are inconsistent about whether plaintiffs may proceed pseudonymously in suits challenging university disciplinary proceedings for sexual assault. But here, the Seventh Circuit adheres to its distinctively strong presumption against pseudonymous litigation: John Doe may either dismiss his pending appeals or have them resolved under his real name.
19. After a carjacking at a St. Louis County, Mo. Waffle House, police use the “Find My” app to track down AirPods that were in the stolen car. They get a warrant for the house purportedly containing the AirPods, smash in, force the mother (in her underwear) and children to go outside, punch a hole in a wall, and otherwise ransack the place. And discover it and the occupants are unconnected to the crime. Turns out the AirPods were in the street out in front. Eighth Circuit: Find My and qualified immunity pair nicely.
20. In the Ninth Circuit, here’s a generally gross story of an ICE agent convicted for trying to have sex with what he thought was a 13-year-old prostitute. (Spoiler: The “13-year-old prostitute” was also federal law enforcement.)
21. What do you get when you mix Kevin Costner’s Yellowstone with slightly less murder and slightly more promissory estoppel? This sprawling litigation between a conservancy nonprofit and a financier who desperately wants to build a 2,500-square-foot guesthouse on his Wyoming ranch. Tenth Circuit: The conservancy is not promissorily estopped based on a conversation its director had with the financier on the deck of the Teton Pines Country Club, at which (the financier insists) the director said a guesthouse could be built so long as it wasn’t called a “guesthouse.”
22. This Tenth Circuit case is interesting for two reasons. One, it accepts the gov’t’s concession that it’s plain error to sentence an assault defendant more harshly because he was an off-duty police officer. Two, it’s kind of the 1997 Julia Roberts movie My Best Friend’s Wedding—but an R-Rated version where Rupert Everett almost gets shot.
23. “Lincoln may have freed the slaves, but I’m keeping you.” As a matter of law, that’s an off-color comment rather than a ground to find an objectively hostile work environment. Query, though, whether the Eleventh Circuit should have addressed the speaker’s conflation of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment.
24. And in en banc news, the Ninth Circuit will not reconsider its decision that an objection to COVID-19 testing was not sufficiently connected to religious doctrine to state a claim under Title VII. Fans of dissentals will be chuffed.

New Case Alert! In San Jose, Cal., drivers have to navigate a network of nearly 500 automated license plate readers that the police department installed all over the city. These high-tech surveillance cameras blanket hospice facilities, churches, and countless other sensitive places, and they snap hundreds of millions of warrantless images every year, instantly converting them into easily searchable data that thousands of gov’t employees can access on demand. Yikes? Yikes. Fourth Amendment Yikes, to be precise. Which is why IJ has entered the fray

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Last year, Yale University President Maurie McInnis formed a committee of Yale faculty members to “undertake a project of thorough self-examination.” She wanted to know: Why is the public losing trust in higher education institutions like Yale?

This week, after a year of gathering input from students, faculty, journalists, and critics of higher education, the committee released its findings: The culprits for this erosion of trust, as The New York Times summarized, are “Schools like Yale.”

The report identified several reasons Yale has lost public favor, including grade inflation, bureaucratic bloat, rising tuition costs, and controversial admissions practices. Notably, the report details at length Yale’s shortcomings regarding “matters of free speech, political bias, and self-censorship.”

The committee writes that Yale has “repeatedly affirmed” the Woodward Report, a pro–free speech document adopted by the school in 1975. 

“Even so,” the committee admits, “the campus has not been immune from pressures toward conformity, intimidation, and social shaming that have affected the rest of higher education and, indeed, the rest of American society. Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that a great deal of campus life is now lived online. “

The report also references the infamous Halloween incident at Yale from 2015, where school administrators emailed the student body and told them not to wear culturally insensitive Halloween costumes. A Yale lecturer subsequently told students to make their own choices about their costumes and quoted her husband (a Yale professor), who advised students to either look away when they see an offensive costume or tell the person why they find the costume offensive. Students surrounded the professor on campus and demanded that he apologize or resign. The viral video of the confrontation sparked national debate about political correctness, student safe spaces, and free expression. 

“Few episodes have done more to raise public questions about Yale’s commitment to freedom of expression and open, reasoned debate,” the report says.

Reason’s Robby Soave warned of the incident’s chilling effect on speech at the time, writing, “a great many students, it seems, don’t actually desire a campus climate where such matters are up for debate. By their own admission, they want anyone who disagrees with them branded a threat to their safety and removed from their lives.”

And it appears the chilling effect on speech has only worsened since 2015. The report, citing a 2025 university survey, says that nearly a third of undergraduate respondents said they did not feel free to express their political beliefs on campus. The committee notes that the figure is “up from 17 percent in 2015,” the time of the Halloween episode. The report also says, “post-doctoral fellows and international students at Yale report that they now hesitate to speak out, even about their own research, for fear of government retaliation.” 

According to the report, no subject was “more contested” than the issue of ideological conformity on campus. The report notes that among Yale faculty in 2025, “registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 36 to 1 across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Law School, and the School of Management,” according to an estimate by the Buckley Institute. While conservative students “said they had found a real home at Yale,” there were communities and classes in which they felt unwelcome. Some alumni worry “the campus was trending toward intellectual and ideological conformity,” while other “members of the Yale community pushed back against that narrative,” seeing “the issue of intellectual diversity as a smokescreen for mounting restrictions on academic freedom.” 

The Yale faculty members say the university has taken steps to address these problems and encourage a more open academic environment, including adopting an institutional neutrality policy. The report also lists recommendations for how the school should foster open inquiry and expression going forward. 

Yale’s self-critical examination is refreshing to see, even if it’s long overdue. Still, the university has a long way to go before it can live up to its free speech promises. Committee reports by tenured faculty and top-down university policies might be the first step, but they can only go so far in ensuring that students and staff can freely express their opinions without fear of retribution. 

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Live Nation and Ticketmaster were found liable for monopolizing parts of the live entertainment market on Wednesday, after a panel of jurors concluded that concertgoers were overcharged a whopping $1.72 per ticket at certain venues. 

Live Nation, a venue operator and concert promoter, acquired Ticketmaster, which facilitates primary and secondary ticket sales, in 2010. In 2024, Live Nation was sued by the Justice Department, states, and the District of Columbia for allegedly monopolizing primary ticketing services, concert venues, and promotional services. (The motivation for the suit was misdirected public outrage over resale ticket prices to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour exceeding $2,000, whose sale Ticketmaster did not facilitate.) 

In March, Live Nation settled with some of the plaintiffs, including the Justice Department, Arkansas, Iowa, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and South Dakota, by setting aside a combined $18.6 million for these states and accepting structural remedies. 

The District of Columbia and 33 states, however, rejected these terms and continued the case against Live Nation, leading to the Wednesday verdict, which found that Live Nation had monopolized large amphitheaters and tied artists’ use of these spaces to use of Live Nation’s promotional services. Since Live Nation owns 78 percent of large amphitheaters in the United States, it is hard to avoid Live Nation venues on a major summer tour. But “‘hard to avoid’ isn’t the same as ‘formally conditioned,'” says Brian Albrecht, chief economist at the International Center for Law and Economics. 

Ticketmaster, a subsidiary of Live Nation, was found liable for monopolizing primary ticketing services to major concert venues by facilitating 86 percent of ticketing for these venues, 70 percent of which are controlled by its parent company. The ruling was made despite the number of primary ticketing services (such as AXS and SeatGeek) increasing since Live Nation purchased Ticketmaster, showing that Ticketmaster has not prevented new companies from entering the market. 

Still, the existence of competitors does not necessarily imply robust competition. For example, if one firm offers a platform that is far and away superior to the alternatives, it might be able to exercise some degree of pricing power. Case in point, Mitch Helgerson, chief revenue officer of the Minnesota Wild NHL team, testified that SeatGeek had significantly less experience than Ticketmaster in handling high-demand on-sales for concerts and had a long way to go to build up its credibility.

Accordingly, Albrecht says we need to examine Ticketmaster’s actions, rather than the number of competitors it may or may not have, to determine if it is a monopolist. 

One action cited at trial was Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino telling then–Barclays Center CEO John Abbamondi that if the venue chose another ticketing platform, he would have a hard time delivering tickets without Ticketmaster. (Live Nation’s consent decree with the Justice Department “expressly prohibited [Live Nation] from retaliating against any venue that considers or works with another primary ticketing service.”) 

Albrecht tells Reason that shows promoted by Live Nation at the Barclays Center dropped from 23 to 14 when the venue switched from Ticketmaster to SeatGeek in 2021. Then, when Barclays switched back in 2023, this figure increased to 28, and then 34 one year later. 

While this evidence could indicate anticompetitive conduct, it could just as easily be explained by efficiency gains from vertical integration. 

Albrecht explains that “integrated firms have real reasons to prefer their own downstream systems — shared fan data, unified [customer relationship management system], faster settlement.” Because of this infrastructure, it is cheaper for Live Nation to route “a show into a Ticketmaster-ticketed venue…than rebuilding all of that for SeatGeek each time.” 

If Ticketmaster had successfully monopolized ticketing for the major concert venue market, the company should have higher profit margins in this market. 

Economist Dennis Carlton testified that Ticketmaster’s gross profit margin is 3.2 percentage points lower within the major concert venue market than outside of it. If Ticketmaster were extracting rents from fans—that is, behaving like a monopolist—its “inside-market margins should be higher than outside,” explains Albrecht. Economist Nicholas Hill, an expert witness for the plaintiffs, affirmed that he did not offer “any evidence of [major concert venues]…being charged monopoly prices” by Ticketmaster. 

Regardless, Live Nation and Ticketmaster have been found liable on all counts; the question is not whether they’ll be punished, but how severely. If the companies are broken up, consumers should not expect their live entertainment experiences to become significantly cheaper, but to involve more hassle.

The post Jury Finds Live Nation and Ticketmaster To Be Monopolists Over $1.72 Concert Ticket Price Increase appeared first on Reason.com.

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The best sign of a U.S.-Iranian compromise is both sides insisting that they aren’t giving anything up. On Friday morning, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that he had reached a deal with Iran to give up its enriched uranium. “No money will exchange hands,” he claimed, and the “deal is in no way subject to Lebanon, either,” though he also declared that “Israel will not be bombing Lebanon any longer.”

The lady doth protest too much. Axios reports that in Pakistani-brokered talks, the U.S. has offered to unfreeze several billion dollars of Iranian money in foreign banks in exchange for the uranium. And the Israeli press reports that Trump pushed Israel to accept a ceasefire with Lebanon, over the Israeli government’s objections, because Iran threatened to walk out of talks.

Meanwhile, the same morning, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi declared the Strait of Hormuz “completely open for the remaining period of ceasefire, on the coordinated route” announced by Iranian authorities. Iranian officials rushed to downplay Araghchi’s statement, claiming that there is actually “no new agreement” on Hormuz, that ships transiting the strait must continue paying Iran a toll, and that Iran was reserving the right to retaliate for the U.S. blockade. The lady, again, doth protest too much.

Trump also claimed that the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports would “REMAIN IN FULL FORCE” until a final peace deal was reached, which “SHOULD GO VERY QUICKLY.” While the U.S. military says that it has turned around 19 ships, shipping data show that several Iranian-linked ships have crossed the U.S.-declared blockade line over the past few days.

Of course, nothing is over until it’s over. U.S.-Iranian talks have broken down into war twice already. And the Trump administration has used optimistic statements—which later failed to pan out—to pump markets several times. The real test is whether momentum will continue once the U.S.-Iranian ceasefire officially expires next week. An Iranian source told Al Jazeera on Friday afternoon that “we are still at the beginning of the process, not at the level of a finalized agreement.”

Ironically, the deal on offer is similar to past deals that Trump bashed Democratic presidents for making. Rather than a total ban on the Iranian nuclear industry, the U.S. and Iran are discussing a temporary freeze on uranium enrichment, with the duration subject to haggling, according to Axios. Back in 2018, the Trump administration had promised to get a nuclear deal with Iran that “never expires.”

And Iran would reportedly receive economic relief in exchange. Trump is technically correct that “no money will exchange hands” in the proposed deal, because Iran will get to access its own money, which had been paid out by oil customers into foreign bank accounts that were later frozen by the U.S. Treasury. But when former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden similarly unfroze Iranian money, Trump accused them of giving “American taxpayer dollars” to Iran.

Limits on Iran’s missile arsenal, which were a major demand of the Trump administration and Republican hawks before the war, seem to have been dropped from the negotiations. Instead, the administration is insisting that it has “functionally destroyed” Iran’s missile force. U.S. military officials disagree.

“Iran retains thousands of missiles and one-way attack UAVs that can threaten U.S. and partner forces throughout the region, despite degradations to its capabilities from both attrition and expenditure,” Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. James Adams testified to Congress on Thursday.

Of course, Iran has taken serious damage from the war. Iranian authorities estimate war reconstruction costs at $270 billion, and it will be unable to recover without U.S. sanctions being lifted, which is a major U.S. point of leverage. Moving forward, Israel has won direct U.S. support against Iran and Hezbollah, the pro-Iran militia in Lebanon.

But thousands of innocent people have been killed and millions of people around the world have been pushed into poverty to get to this point, not to mention the potential $1 trillion cost to American taxpayers. And Trump had originally planned for this war to be a three-day operation to overthrow the Iranian government once and for all. If the end result is a deal that was already on the table—or a return to war—then was it all worth it?

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For the first time in a decade, there are no U.S. bases in Syria. The Syrian foreign ministry and U.S. Central Command both announced on Thursday afternoon that U.S. forces had handed over their last base in Syria to the Syrian army. The U.S. military may continue to advise and support the Syrian army without permanent outposts, reports The New York Times.

U.S. troops first entered Syria in 2015 to support Kurdish rebels against the Islamic State group, which lost its last Syrian territory in 2019. President Donald Trump flip-flopped several times in his first term about whether U.S. troops would stay. He declared a U.S. withdrawal in December 2018, backtracked on it, declared another withdrawal in October 2019, and backtracked again after neighboring Turkey invaded Kurdish-held areas of Syria.

U.S. officials pushed to keep a military presence in Syria, shifting its mission from fighting the Islamic State group to confronting Iran and Russia. Trump administration envoy James Jeffrey publicly admitted to playing “shell games” to hide the full size of the U.S. deployment and preempt political pressure to leave.

The Syrian civil war (and the major Russian-Iranian presence) ended with the December 2024 revolution, led by Ahmad al-Sharaa, a former commander in Al Qaeda who became a U.S.-friendly reformer. But the Trump administration considered keeping U.S. forces in Syria for good. Late last year, the U.S. military began joint patrols with the new Syrian army and visited the site of a potential U.S. base to monitor the Syrian-Israeli border.

Events in Syria seem to have made that option completely unpalatable. In December 2025, a Syrian police officer shot up a meeting between Syrian and U.S. troops in Palmyra, killing three Americans. It was a reminder that despite the new Syrian government’s eagerness to please Washington, many of its rank-and-file supporters still resented the foreign army on their soil.

Then, in January 2026, negotiations between the Kurdish rebels and the new Syrian government broke down. The Syrian army launched a lightning offensive that forced Kurds to submit to central government rule. Fearing a prison break amid the chaos, the U.S. military evacuated thousands of Islamic State suspects from Syrian Kurdish custody to Iraq. The decade-old alliance that had brought the U.S. military to Syria in the first place was over.

Finally, the war with Iran showed just how vulnerable American troops in the Middle East were to missiles and drones. Unlike the well-defended U.S. fortresses in Israel and the Persian Gulf monarchies, U.S. outposts in Syria were ramshackle affairs that lacked air defenses. A drone attack by Iraqi guerrillas in January 2024 had already killed three U.S. troops on the Syrian-Jordanian border.

The U.S. withdrawal from Syria happened under the best possible circumstances, with a friendly Syrian government in power and a minimum of violence. But it still happened against the will of hawks who wanted the U.S. military in Syria forever—with a constantly shifting justification.

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When the Trump administration tore up a trade agreement that allowed fresh tomatoes to be imported from Mexico without tariffs, the White House framed it as a victory for “American farmers, growers, and business owners.”

Experts in the produce industry, however, warned that consumers would be paying the price.

The end of the Tomato Suspension Agreement between the U.S. and Mexico was a “big concern,” Javier “JJ” Badillo, chair of the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas (FPAA)’s tomato division, told FreshFruitPortal.com, a trade publication, in July. Badillo predicted higher prices and diminished volumes of fresh tomatoes, even though it would take “six to nine months” for the consequences to become apparent.

Chalk up another victory for the experts over the politicians.

Nine months after the Trump administration blew up that trade agreement, prices for fresh tomatoes at American grocery stores are skyrocketing. A pound of tomatoes cost an average of $2.26 in March, according to the latest consumer price index report released last week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). That’s the highest price recorded in eight years, and a 15 percent increase from February to March.

Tomato prices are now 23 percent higher than they were in March 2025, according to the BLS. That means tomato prices have risen significantly faster than overall inflation (up 3.3 percent in the past year) and food prices as a whole (which are up 2.7 percent). Even gas prices, which get more attention, are up just 18.9 percent in the past year.

So why are tomatoes suddenly much more expensive? In part, it’s because tomatoes imported from Mexico are now subject to tariffs. With the tomato trade agreement gone, Mexican tomatoes are now subject to a tariff of about 17 percent—and, like with many other products, the tariff gets passed along down the supply chain.

There’s also been a notable reduction in tomato imports.

“Tomato imports from Mexico declined by over $500 million,” reported Joseph Glauber, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, in a report published this week. That decline, Glauber notes, was due to the elimination of the “long-standing agreement that allowed Mexico to export tomatoes to the US” and the new tariffs “that resulted in fewer imports.”

You might expect higher prices for fresh tomatoes to drive up the price of products made from tomatoes—everything from pizza sauce to ketchup. That’s unlikely, however, because the supply chains are actually quite different.

The market for processed tomato products is highly concentrated in the United States. About 95 percent of tomatoes used for processing originate in California. Meanwhile, the U.S. imports about 70 percent of its supply of fresh tomatoes, and the vast majority comes from Mexico.

Higher prices for fresh tomatoes are good news for American farmers, as the White House said last year when terminating the trade agreement. Still, the administration’s reasoning is quite telling. As the administration was considering terminating the tomato trade deal, Commerce Department officials told The Wall Street Journal last year that the deal “has failed to protect U.S. tomato growers from unfairly priced Mexican imports.”

That’s a good illustration of how the Trump administration approaches economic issues. Framing trade in terms of “fairness” is a typical left-wing tactic—and it always misses huge parts of the picture.

Those imported tomatoes from Mexico don’t just provide inexpensive salad and sandwich components for Americans. They also support tons of American jobs. A 2025 study calculated that imported tomatoes provided more than $8.3 billion in economic impact in the U.S.

When the Trump administration prioritizes the interests of American tomato farmers over the interests of consumers and the rest of the tomato-related market, it is not scoring a victory for fairness or sound economic principles. It is just playing favorites and expecting everyone else to bear the cost.

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