Customs officials told a federal court that issuing refunds tied to tariffs imposed under emergency powers would require millions of labor hours and major changes to existing systems.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
Federal customs officials told a court that the government cannot immediately carry out a judicial order requiring refunds for tariffs collected under emergency economic powers, citing the scale and complexity of the task.
In a sworn statement filed with the court, a senior U.S. Customs and Border Protection official said processing the refunds would require redirecting personnel from national security and economic enforcement responsibilities. Details were outlined in a court filing available in the official affidavit submitted by CBP.
Brandon Lord, executive director of the Trade Programs Directorate at Customs and Border Protection, said the agency is facing what he described as an unprecedented volume of refunds tied to tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
Processing those payments would require significant manpower and could interfere with critical enforcement duties, he wrote.
The dispute stems from a ruling by the U.S. Court of International Trade, which earlier this week ordered the federal government to begin issuing refunds for duties imposed using emergency authority. The tariffs had originally been implemented under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, part of the broader trade policy actions described in government filings in the case against the Trump administration’s tariff program.
The ruling followed a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court on Feb. 20 determining that the statute did not authorize the president to impose tariffs under that particular emergency law.
According to the affidavit, approximately $166 billion in tariffs and estimated duty deposits tied to those measures had been collected as of Wednesday.
Lord told the court that the government’s existing technology and administrative procedures are not designed to process refunds on such a large scale.
He said there are more than 53 million customs entries involving the duties, a workload that would require an estimated 4,431,161 labor hours for CBP personnel to complete using current procedures.
“CBP has never been ordered to, nor has it attempted to, process a volume of refunds anywhere near the volume of total entries and Entry Summary lines on which IEEPA duties have been deposited,” Lord wrote in the filing.
He also pointed to a historical precedent in which customs officials were ordered to issue refunds after the Supreme Court ruled that the Harbor Maintenance Fee had been improperly applied to exports. That earlier process, which followed the Court’s decision in United States Shoe Corporation v. United States in 1998, took several years to complete and required the development of new regulatory procedures.
The agency now plans to design a new refund system intended to simplify the process by consolidating payments for each importer rather than issuing tens of millions of individual refunds.
Officials said the updated process would allow refunds and associated interest payments to be grouped by importer, which would significantly reduce the number of individual transactions required.
The government told the court it expects to develop and implement the revised procedure within approximately 45 days.
“The process will be simpler and more efficient than the existing functionalities, and CBP will provide guidance on how to file to refund declarations in the new system,” the affidavit stated.
Meanwhile, some companies that attempted to recover tariff payments have already been denied refunds while the legal and administrative issues remain unresolved, according to reporting cited in the Financial Times.
The dispute over tariffs has also triggered new legal challenges. A coalition of Democratic state attorneys general filed a lawsuit against the administration, arguing that recent tariff actions taken after the Supreme Court ruling attempt to bypass the court’s decision. The complaint filed in federal court can be reviewed in the case document submitted by the states in State of Oregon et al. v. Donald J. Trump et al..
Following the Supreme Court’s ruling, President Donald Trump announced a new global tariff using separate statutory authority, posting the announcement publicly on Truth Social. The administration initially set the tariff at 10 percent before raising it to 15 percent the following day.
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