Trump admin refunds $100 billion in ‘liberation day’ tariffs

The Trump administration said it has refunded about $100 billion of the tariff revenue that was collected before President Donald Trump‘s “liberation day” duties were struck down by the Supreme Court.

The figure, reported Tuesday in a filing in the U.S. Court of International Trade, represents about 60% of the roughly $166 billion the government says it raked in from the sweeping tariffs Trump imposed in 2025 using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA.

Those tariffs were scrapped in late February after the high court ruled IEEPA did not authorize them. About two weeks later, federal Judge Richard Eaton ordered that tariffs collected under IEEPA must be refunded to the importers.

Trump, who placed heavy-handed tariffs at the center of his economic and foreign policy agendas, has vented his rage over the court rulings, and his administration has recently taken a series of steps to effectively re-create the IEEPA tariff regime using other legal authorities.

“Tariffs have been incredible. We’ve taken in hundreds of billions of dollars,” Trump said Tuesday in a Fox News interview. “Supreme Court gave us a little shot, but we’re allowed to do it in a different manner.”

Those different tariff methods are already facing their own court challenges. In the meantime, the Trump administration has been doling out refunds to the defunct IEEPA regime.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection in late April implemented a system called Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries, or CAPE, to track and deliver tariff refunds.

As of July 31, CAPE has received 252,496 tariff refund declarations covering more than 25 million import entries, CBP official Brandon Lord said in Tuesday’s filing, a court-ordered update on the administration’s progress delivering the refunds.

Nearly $129 billion in “both potential and certified refunds” have been accepted for processing through the CAPE system, Lord said. Of that total, approximately $100 billion has been completed, certified and sent to the Treasury Department for disbursement, he wrote.

The filing came in a lawsuit filed by Freestyle World, a California-based importer that seeks to mount a class action on behalf of smaller businesses that paid IEEPA tariffs and say they face barriers getting refunds through CAPE. The government maintains that the request for class certification came too late and is invalid anyway.

Either way, the Trump administration’s refund operation still has a long way to go: more than 330,000 importers paid IEEPA tariffs on over 53 million entries.