Trump Administration Returns US$100 Billion in 'Extorted' Tariffs After Supreme Court Rebuke

The administration of US President Donald Trump has returned approximately US$100 billion, or around Rp1,800 trillion, in tariff revenue to importers after the ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs were struck down by the US Supreme Court. The figure was disclosed in documents filed by the US government with the US Court of International Trade on Tuesday, 4 August 2026. The refund amount equates to roughly 60% of the total US$166 billion the government claims it collected from the broad tariffs imposed by Trump throughout 2025 under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The tariffs were revoked at the end of February after the Supreme Court ruled that IEEPA does not grant the president the authority to impose such duties. About two weeks later, Federal Judge Richard Eaton ordered that all tariffs collected under IEEPA be returned to importers. Tariff policy has been a central pillar of Trump’s economic and foreign policy agenda. The president has also publicly displayed his anger at the court rulings that overturned the tariffs. ‘The tariff policy has delivered tremendous results. We have collected hundreds of billions of dollars. The Supreme Court gave us a little bit of a roadblock, but we are allowed to do it a different way,’ Trump said in an interview with Fox News on Tuesday. Following the Supreme Court defeat, the Trump administration has taken several steps to effectively rebuild the IEEPA tariff regime using other legal bases. However, these new tariff methods have also faced their own legal challenges in court. While confronting various new lawsuits, the US government continues to process refunds for the tariffs previously collected under IEEPA. To manage the process, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) implemented a system called the Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries (CAPE) in late April. The system is designed to track and distribute tariff refunds to importers. In documents filed with the court on Tuesday, CBP official Brandon Lord detailed the latest progress of the refund process. According to Lord, as of 31 July, the CAPE system had received 252,496 refund declarations covering more than 25 million import entries. ‘Nearly US$129 billion consisting of potential refunds and certified refunds has been received for processing through the CAPE system,’ he stated. Of that amount, approximately US$100 billion has been fully processed, certified, and sent to the US Department of the Treasury for payment to importers. The document was filed as part of a court-ordered update on the government’s progress in returning the tariff funds. The development comes amid a lawsuit filed by Freestyle World, a California-based importing company. The firm is seeking to bring a class action on behalf of small companies that previously paid the IEEPA tariffs and claim they face various obstacles in obtaining refunds through the CAPE system. The US government, however, argues that the motion for class certification was filed too late and is legally invalid. Regardless of the legal wrangling, the Trump administration’s refund operation is far from complete. Government data shows that more than 330,000 importers paid IEEPA tariffs on over 53 million import entries. This means that despite the US$100 billion already returned, the government must still complete a massive amount of refunds to hundreds of thousands of other importers affected by the tariff policy that was ultimately struck down by the Supreme Court.