Two weeks after the Supreme Court struck down the 2025 IEEPA tariffs, the US Court of International Trade turned the ruling into a specific, quantified directive: refund the money. On March 4, 2026, in Atmus Filtration, Inc. v. United States, Judge Eaton ordered Customs and Border Protection to process refunds of approximately $166 billion in duties collected under the now-invalidated IEEPA authority. The order covers 53 million entries and affects around 330,000 importers.
If you imported anything into the United States during 2025 or early 2026 and paid reciprocal or China/Hong Kong tariffs, there is a meaningful probability that some of your entries are inside that pool. This post walks through what the CIT actually ordered, how the numbers break down, and the two procedural risks importers should be watching.
Why the CIT, not the Supreme Court, issues the refund order
The Supreme Court decides constitutional questions. It does not manage the mechanics of giving money back to 330,000 importers. That job falls to the Court of International Trade, a specialist federal court based in New York whose jurisdiction covers customs and international trade disputes under 28 U.S.C. § 1581.
When the Supreme Court invalidated the IEEPA tariff authority, it produced a question the CIT was well positioned to answer: given that the duties were unlawful, what obligation does CBP have to return them, and on what timeline? The Atmus Filtration case gave the CIT the vehicle to issue a concrete order.
What the order actually directs
Judge Eaton’s order is a directive to CBP — not a cheque in the mail to importers. In plain terms, it requires CBP to:
- Identify the universe of entries on which IEEPA-authorised duties were collected
- Build or adapt a processing mechanism capable of handling the volume
- Refund duties to importers whose entries remain eligible under the existing finality and protest framework
- Report progress and timing back to the court
The word “eligible” is doing a lot of work in that list, and it is where most of the uncertainty lives. An entry is only eligible for a refund if it has not become final under CBP’s own finality rules. The basic lifecycle is: entry filed → duties paid → CBP liquidates the entry → a finite window opens for the importer to protest or request reliquidation → the entry becomes final. Once an entry is final, CBP generally cannot reopen it, and a refund is no longer automatic.
The CIT’s order does not override the finality framework. It directs CBP to refund duties on entries that are still inside the framework — and, by strong implication, to be transparent about which entries it considers outside that universe.
Breaking down the $166 billion
The dollar figure is the headline, but the entry count and importer count are what tell you how this will be administered. The math works out to roughly:
- $3,100 average duty per entry across 53 million entries
- $500,000 average refund per importer across 330,000 importers — though the real distribution is extremely skewed, with a long tail of very small importers and a short head of very large ones
- 160 entries per importer on average — again, concentrated
For most readers of this post, the useful takeaway is that you do not need to be a Fortune 500 importer to have a six-figure claim. If your business imports regularly from China, Hong Kong, or from any of the countries hit by the reciprocal tariff layer in 2025, a full year of duty payments on those lines is very likely in the six figures.
The two risks sitting on top of the order
Before the order translates into money in bank accounts, two things have to play out.
1. The government may appeal
The CIT’s refund order is appealable to the Federal Circuit. The government has indicated it may seek review, and a window for filing such an appeal runs through early May 2026. An appeal could produce a stay of Judge Eaton’s order, which would pause the refund mechanism until the Federal Circuit rules.
What an appeal would not do is revive the IEEPA tariff authority itself. The Supreme Court ruling is final on that point. The question on appeal would be narrower: the timing, scope, and mechanics of the refund process. A successful government appeal delays payment; it does not put the duties back on a lawful footing.
The practical implication: a pending or threatened appeal is not a reason to wait on your own claim. The 180-day protest deadline keeps running regardless. If anything, a pending appeal is a reason to protect entries through the protest channel — which is backed by a separate line of statutory authority in 19 U.S.C. § 1514 and does not depend on the CIT’s refund order being affirmed.
2. CBP’s refund machinery is not ready yet
CBP is building a new system called CAPE (Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries) to handle IEEPA refunds at volume. As of early 2026, reporting suggests CAPE’s components are at varying stages of readiness — the claim intake portal well developed, the mass-processing and disbursement layers less so. We cover CAPE in our CAPE explainer.
The relevant point for this post is that an importer whose entries are close to the 180-day protest deadline cannot reasonably wait for CAPE to come online. The protest channel exists today, it has explicit statutory authority, and it does not depend on a new CBP system being production-ready.
What the order does not change
A few things worth underlining, because the headlines blur them:
- Section 301 and Section 232 duties are not covered. Those tariffs flow from different statutes and were not before the Supreme Court. If you paid duties on steel, aluminium, or Chinese goods under 301, the Atmus order does not help you. Standard protests remain the only path for those claims.
- Self-liquidating entries may be excluded. Certain entry types (Type 11 is the commonly cited example) liquidate on a faster timeline that puts them outside the protest and refund framework very quickly. Those entries may already be final.
- CBP may offset refunds against amounts the importer owes on other grounds — classification errors, unpaid fees, reconciliation issues. A clean entry record matters.
What to do this week if you are inside the pool
If you imported goods during the IEEPA tariff period, the practical checklist is short:
- Find the liquidation date on every affected entry. Your customs broker has this. The deadline for a protest is exactly 180 days later.
- Prioritise entries with deadlines in the next 60 days. Those are urgent and may not be salvageable through CAPE if the finality question goes against importers.
- File a protest on urgent entries now rather than waiting for CAPE. The protest preserves the claim through a channel that does not depend on the refund order being affirmed on appeal. See our protest-as-insurance piece for the full argument.
Tariff Spot generates a complete Form 19 protest package for a flat fee and mails it to CBP in the format the regulation requires. Start a claim and we will walk you through the entry list.