Fox Rothschild | Court Orders $166 Billion in Tariff Refunds — Then Pauses Them — in 48 Hours

Officials from U.S. Customs and Border Protection assured the court that an automated refund tool could be ready within 45 days.

In what may be the single largest refund directive in the history of U.S. customs law, Judge Richard K. Eaton of the U.S. Court of International Trade on March 4 ordered U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to liquidate and reliquidate every entry subject to duties imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act—”without regard to the IEEPA duties.”

In plain English: give the money back. All of it. To everyone.

The backdrop is now familiar. On Feb. 20, the Supreme Court ruled in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that IEEPA tariffs were unlawful. What was less clear was what would happen next.

Judge Eaton answered that question with unusual speed and breadth, reasoning that every importer of record whose entries were hit with IEEPA duties is entitled to relief — and that the Supreme Court’s recent skepticism of universal injunctions in Trump v. CASA, Inc. simply does not apply to the Court of International Trade, which has exclusive, nationwide jurisdiction over customs disputes. It helped that the Chief Judge had already designated Judge Eaton as the sole judge to hear all IEEPA-duty refund cases, eliminating any risk of conflicting orders from different chambers.

The Government Responds

The government’s reply boiled down to a single, emphatic message: we can’t do this.

In a declaration filed March 6, Brandon Lord, the Executive Director of CBP’s Trade Programs Directorate, laid bare the logistical nightmare the court’s order had created.

As of March 4, more than 330,000 importers had filed over 53 million entries touching IEEPA duties, involving roughly $166 billion in duties and estimated deposits. Of those, about 20.1 million entries remained unliquidated, while a further 33.7 million were informal entries that liquidated automatically upon payment. That means CBP had no mechanism to claw them back into the pipeline at all.

The operational details were no more encouraging. CBP’s core trade system, the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE), automatically liquidates entries every Friday at 2:00 AM ET, and it cannot tell an IEEPA-duty entry from any other kind. Hitting the brakes on all 700,000-plus scheduled weekly liquidations would cause roughly 1,000 entries to miss their statutory deadlines and liquidate by operation of law, potentially at the wrong duty rates for antidumping and countervailing duty orders. And doing refunds one at a time? Each takes about five minutes to process manually, which adds up to more than 4.4 million labor hours. To make matters worse, only 21,423 of the 330,000-plus affected importers had even completed the setup to receive electronic refunds, which became mandatory on February 6.

CBP did, however, offer a path forward: it is building new automated functionality within ACE that it says could be ready within 45 days. Under the proposed system, importers would file declarations in ACE identifying their IEEPA-duty entries, and the system would then automatically recalculate duties, aggregate refunds with interest, and certify them for payment by the Treasury Department.

The Court Relents

It worked. On March 6, after a conference with the parties, Judge Eaton issued a new order suspending his amended March 5 directive “to the extent that it directs immediate compliance.”

Notably, the court did not vacate or withdraw the underlying order — it simply acknowledged that immediate execution is not feasible. CBP now has breathing room to build its automated refund tool, though the court set no specific deadline and left the terms of the suspension deliberately open-ended.

What This Means

The bottom line is clear even if the timeline is not: importers who paid IEEPA duties are getting refunds — the only question is when. CBP’s 45-day estimate for new ACE functionality points to mid-to-late April 2026 as the earliest realistic window, but that target could easily slip.

In the meantime, importers should not sit still. If you have not yet completed the electronic refund setup process required under CBP’s Interim Final Rule, do so now — refund payments will be rejected without it. And keep a close eye on the Atmus Filtration docket. This case is moving fast, and the next development could come at any time.

Compliments of Fox Rothschild – a member of the EACCNY