The U.S. business community is staring down a long, unwinding line of court cases, each one asking for something simple on paper but enormously complex in practice: the return of billions of dollars in tariffs that the Supreme Court has now declared unlawful. Those numbers are staggering, but the real story right now is not so much the dollar amount as the legal and bureaucratic machinery that must clear a backlog of roughly 2,000 refund-related cases before any importer can reliably count on a check.
The backdrop is the Supreme Court’s February 20th decision in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, which found that President Trump lacked authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose tariffs on certain goods. The Court did not lay out a detailed refund playbook, leaving open the question of how the government would administer the return of money already collected through that authority. What it did confirm is that importers who paid IEEPA-based duties are entitled to those amounts, even if the precise mechanics of repayment remain unsettled.
In the months leading up to that ruling, companies began lining up in court to protect their rights. The U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT) responded in December 2025 with a broad administrative stay on new IEEPA-tariff refund cases, effectively freezing roughly 2,000 actions that had been filed or were about to be filed until the Supreme Court’s view was final. Once the Court issued its verdict, the stay was no longer absolute, but the CIT still needed to decide how to prioritize those cases and how to coordinate with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) on reliquidation and refunds.
A useful snapshot of how these cases are expected to shape the refund process is the V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. Trump line of litigation. V.O.S. Selections, Inc. challenged the IEEPA tariffs in the CIT and later in the Federal Circuit, a path that eventually led to the Supreme Court. After the Court’s ruling, V.O.S. moved to have its case fast-tracked back to the CIT so that a template for handling refunds could be worked out quickly. The plaintiffs argue that a clear, orderly process in their case would allow the court to establish a model for how other companies’ claims can be processed, including how and when administrative orders are issued to ensure prompt refunds with interest.
Trade lawyers and customs specialists say that the CIT will likely lean on its residual jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1581(i), the same legal hook that importers used to bring their original challenges, to design a case-management framework. That framework would cover not only the existing 2,000-odd cases but also any new filings that arrive as the scale of the refund universe becomes clearer. The tight knot everyone is watching is how quickly the CIT, the Department of Justice and Treasury can agree on procedures that balance speed against administrative feasibility, especially given the millions of separate entries and the potential for years of litigation per case if the process is not streamlined.
Among the large shippers already in the ring is FedEx Corp. (NYSE: FDX), which filed a refund-related lawsuit in the wake of the Supreme Court decision, joining a wave of additional suits that have been lodged since February 20th. Other major retailers and importers, such as Costco Wholesale Corporation (NASDAQ: COST), have also prepared or filed protective actions in anticipation of broader refund eligibility. These cases do not just seek money back; they push the government to clarify how CBP will re-liquidate entries, how long documentation must be retained, and how disputes over the scope of eligibility will be resolved.
Among the potential risks that loom over this process are delays, mismatched expectations, and political friction. The Trump administration has signaled that fully working through the refund pipeline could take years, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has framed the eventual payout as a form of “corporate welfare,” suggesting that the government may try to slow-walk or narrow the pool of eligible claimants. At the same time, Democrats in Congress are pressing the administration for a concrete plan, noting that the executive branch had months to prepare for an adverse ruling.
What is likely to matter most to businesses in the end is how the CIT uses the current wave of pending cases as a way to force a structured refund process rather than a case-by-case scramble. If the court can lock in a repeatable template for adjudicating refunds, for directing CBP’s reliquidation steps, and for handling interest calculations, companies will move from uncertainty into a more predictable, if still prolonged, timeline. That is the quiet pivot point of the thousands of cases now on the docket: not whether importers deserve refunds, which the Court has already answered, but how the system will turn that legal right into actual dollars in bank accounts.
