Supreme Court decision leaves tariff refunds uncertain for US importers

While the Supreme Court decision overturning President Donald Trump's country-specific tariffs opens the door to potential refunds, importers will likely face obstacles that prolong or even derail payments, trade experts said Feb. 24 at the Washington International Trade Conference.

Even as lower courts rejected Trump's tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, they declined to enjoin the collection of the duties, allowing the government to accumulate $142 billion in 2025, according to an analysis of Customs and Border Patrol data by the Yale University Budget Lab. In a 2025 court filing, the US government said it would not object to reliquidate entries if the country-specific tariffs implemented under IEEPA are found to be unlawful and committed to refund any challenged duties after a Supreme Court decision.

Now that the tariffs have been deemed unconstitutional by the high court, there's an "open question" about whether refunds will be issued, said Brenda Smith, a former executive assistant commissioner of trade at CBP.

"If the government and the Court of International Trade decided, 'we're going to make this easy,' there are still a number of hoops that they will have to jump through and that we in the business community will have to jump through," Smith said during a panel at the Washington International Trade Conference.

"If the government decides to make it hard either at the court level with litigation or at the transactional level with the administrative processes around refunds, this is going to go on for a very long time and it's going to be very questionable whether you will get the money back that you actually paid," she added.

US Customs has an administrative correction process where an importer can file a post-summary correction or protest to fix errors and receive a refund or pay more dues as necessary. Entries are considered unliquidated, or not final, for 314 days. Once an entry liquidates, importers have a 180-day window to file a protest, which US Customs has two years to process. Additionally, entries that require to be re-liquidated require a court order, she said.

"My expectation is the government is not going to want to give back that much money," Smith said. "CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) is the ministerial arm of the government for this, but it is the White House that is going to determine what is the policy."

"The challenge here is not so much the process or the automation, but it is in fact the volume, hundreds of thousands, probably millions of transactions at this point that could be leveraged to pay back refunds," Smith said.

Companies are beginning to file protests if they haven't already on liquidated entries to jumpstart the refund process, said Ryan Majerus, a partner on King and Spalding's international trade team.

"I am similarly skeptical that Customs is going to move on them quickly... potentially due to guidance from the administration but also just the sheer volume - it's just too much," he said.

This has led some clients to contemplate filing lawsuits, Majerus said.

"I think it's going to veer more and more in that direction," he said.

But other trade experts say the uncertainty surrounding refunds is less about whether they will be issued and more about how long the process will take.

Refunds will get paid for importers who either show up in court or show up at Customs, said Timothy Keeler, a co-leader of international trade at Mayer and Brown and a former chief of staff to the US Trade Representative.

"It may be that if the government doesn't want to essentially work out a way to handle this under their own control, then parties may have to end up just filing as plaintiffs at the CIT (Court of International Trade)," Keeler said.

The refund issue may be a bigger issue for Congress to tackle, Smith added. Democratic lawmakers in the House introduced legislation that would require US Customs to automatically issue tariff refunds within 90 days.