The U.S. Court of International Trade approved a petition from importers wishing to file a class-action lawsuit against the federal government over tariff refunds.

On Thursday, the New York-based court certified a group of plaintiffs allowing them to move forward with the joint suit. The complainants have said doing so as a class will simplify the process of pushing for paybacks on the Trump administration’s now-defunct International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) tariffs, which the Supreme Court ruled unlawful in February.

The class includes importers who paid into the duty scheme between Feb. 1, 2025 and Feb. 19, 2026—the day before the tariffs were struck down—and it excludes parties that filed their own separate lawsuits. According to the CIT, more than 4,000 lawsuits have been filed in relation to IEEPA refunds to date.

While Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has already processed around $130 billion of the approximately $166 billion in refunds due to importers through its Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries (CAPE) system, which was built and deployed in the spring, CIT Judge Richard K. Eaton wrote in his slip order that “progress on liquidation and reliquidation, by importers’ voluntary use of CAPE, will one day come to an end.”

Some importers of record, he noted, haven’t utilized the system to request refunds, and that could be because they are “overwhelmingly small importers who, because of the cost or effort involved in filing a CAPE declaration, or because they are unaware of the program, will never take advantage of CAPE.”

Source link