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Refunds of $166bn expected after tariff court case
The Guardian
|March 07, 2026
The US customs agency is preparing a system that will be ready to process refunds for billions of dollars of illegally collected tariffs in 45 days without requiring importers to sue, a court has been told.
Brandon Lord, a top official at US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), said in a filing to the US court of international trade yesterday that the total sum held in relation to such tariffs was estimated to be “approximately $166bn”.
The declaration came as government lawyers were meeting a federal trade judge to hammer out a process for returning the money to about 330,000 importers.
The court of international trade’s website said the meeting would be a “closed conference”, while Gina Justice, its clerk, described it as a “settlement conference”.
The supreme court decided last month that a 1977 law designed to address national emergencies did not provide the legal justification for most of the Trump administration’s global tariffs.
This story is from the March 07, 2026 edition of The Guardian.
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