Court backs off requiring Trump admin to immediately repay $166B in tariffs
The U.S. Court of International Trade suspended a previous order requiring Customs and Border Protection to immediately refund tariff payments, Reuters reports. The announcement comes just hours after the Trump administration said it couldn’t begin payments right away.
Brandon Lord, a Customs and Border Protection official, wrote in a court filing that the agency was facing “an unprecedented volume of refunds,” and paying that $166 billion back would take time. He said “existing administrative procedures and technology” weren’t well-suited for the task. Lord also wrote that the amount of time it would take “will prevent personnel from fully carrying out the agency’s trade enforcement mission.”
“Personnel would be redirected from responsibilities that serve to mitigate imminent threats to national security and economic security,” he wrote.
Lord didn’t refuse to process refunds entirely. Instead, he proposed new “functionality” to its system in which companies that imported products into the U.S. could submit the amount of tariffs they paid, and the government would process their refunds. He said the new “functionality” would be ready in 45 days but did not say how long processing payments would take.
Lord wrote that about 300,000 importers have made 53 million individual tariff payments totaling $166 billion since Trump enacted his tariffs last year.
“CBP has never been ordered to, nor has it attempted to, process a volume of refunds anywhere near the volume,” he wrote.
Why does the US have to pay back tariffs?
In February, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump lacked the authority to invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose broad tariffs. Since the government collected the tariffs illegally, they must pay them back.
Multiple legal groups have filed lawsuits against the government seeking tariff refunds. One of those groups is the Liberty Justice Center, which announced its lawsuit in late April 2025.
“Liberty Justice Center won … on behalf of our five clients and all American businesses that have had to pay illegal, unjust and unconstitutional tariffs, but the fight isn’t over,” Sara Albrecht, chair of the Liberty Justice Center, said. “Now we are asking the courts to ensure the government honors its commitments and refunds American businesses.”
While the American consumer bore the brunt of the Trump administration’s tariffs, they are not expected to receive any tariff refunds. This is because the companies that imported the goods wrote the check to the government for those tariffs. To ensure the company didn’t see any revenue loss, it raised prices for retailers, who then passed them on to consumers.
Some companies, including FedEx and Costco, have promised to distribute any tariff refunds back to customers.
Previous reporting by Straight Arrow News found that Americans covered 96% of tariff costs.
Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
