Importers who paid $166 billion in IEEPA tariffs now ruled unconstitutional cannot get refunds because CBP has no system to process them

On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Learning Resources v. Trump that IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs, invalidating the reciprocal tariffs and fentanyl tariffs imposed starting April 2025. Over 330,000 importers paid approximately $166 billion across 53 million entries under these now-unconstitutional tariffs. The money is gone from their accounts but CBP has no mechanism to return it. This matters because importers — many of them small and mid-sized businesses — made purchasing and pricing decisions under duress, absorbing tariff costs of 20-45% on imports from China, 25% on goods from Canada and Mexico, and 10-46% on goods from dozens of other countries. They raised consumer prices, cut margins, laid off workers, or stopped importing entirely. Now the tariffs have been declared illegal, but getting the money back requires navigating a bureaucratic maze that does not yet exist. CBP announced it is building a new system called CAPE (Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries) with a target launch 45 days from mid-March 2026 — meaning refunds are months away at best. Meanwhile, importers whose entries have already been liquidated face a hard 180-day deadline to file protests, and entries liquidated beyond that window may require expensive litigation at the Court of International Trade. More than 2,000 lawsuits have been filed at the CIT by companies including FedEx, Costco, Dyson, and Nissan. But small importers who cannot afford trade attorneys face losing their refund rights entirely if they miss the protest deadlines while waiting for a system that does not exist yet. The CIT ordered CBP to begin paying refunds immediately on March 4, then suspended that order two days later after a closed-door hearing. This problem persists because the U.S. customs system was never designed for mass retroactive refunds. CBP's ACE system processes entries forward — collecting duties at import. There is no built-in reverse flow. Every prior tariff challenge in history involved a handful of products or companies, not 53 million entries across every tariff line. The institutional architecture assumes tariffs are permanent, not subject to sudden constitutional invalidation, so there is no infrastructure for unwinding them at scale.