Opinion: Washington admitted the tariffs were illegal. It still hasn't finished paying them back.

On Feb. 20, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled that the president's use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose sweeping import tariffs was unlawful — a levy that, by one law firm's tally, had been generating more than $20 billion a month for the Treasury. U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not open its refund portal, known as CAPE, until April 20, nearly two months later, and even now, eight months after the ruling, the agency is still working through the backlog it created.

The numbers tell their own story. Sen. Elizabeth Warren's office says the government collected roughly $166 billion in duties the courts have since deemed illegal, yet as of early June, CBP had accepted only about $95 billion worth of refund claims and routed just $24 billion to the Treasury for actual disbursement. By mid-September, accepted claims had grown to roughly $135 billion — real progress, but still short of the total collected, with about $1.3 billion in approved refunds stuck in limbo because some 20,000 importers had not filed banking information. A third phase of the portal, covering entries CBP had already closed out for good, did not open until Oct. 6, meaning some importers waited nearly eight months past the ruling just for the chance to file a claim.

CBP's own rules for the program, laid out on its trade remedies refund page, promise payment "generally" within 60 to 90 days of an accepted claim, a timeline the agency has struggled to meet given how long it took merely to start accepting claims. The agency does pay statutory interest on what it owes, so importers are not losing money outright. But interest does not replace working capital a small importer needed last spring, and it was that cash-flow squeeze that small businesses described to state-based outlets covering the rollout. Warren's letter accuses the administration of having "slow-walked the refund process while searching for new ways to keep money that never belonged to the government," and it cites economists' estimate that consumers bore roughly 95 percent of the tariffs' cost, working out to about $2,500 per average household — money that, by the courts' own reasoning, should never have left anyone's pocket to begin with.

None of this required a novel legal theory to avoid. A government that stood up a tariff-collection apparatus within days of declaring an economic emergency should be able to stand up a refund apparatus just as fast once courts say the money was never legally its own. Instead, the same agency that moved almost instantly to start charging duties under an emergency-powers statute has spent the better part of a year sorting out how to give that money back, phase by phase, through a portal that only fully opened to the last category of claimants this month. Whatever the administration's legal arguments for the tariffs themselves, there is no equivalent argument for taking eight months to return money a court has already said was taken unlawfully. A functioning government does not need a lawsuit, or a senator's letter, to return money it knows it should not have kept.