Illegal tariffs came in by algorithm. They're going out by hand.

Collecting a tariff takes an importer's declaration and a line of code.▸ Giving one back, it turns out, takes a person. On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act never gave the president the power to impose tariffs at all — voiding the "reciprocal," fentanyl, and Canada/Mexico duties collected since April 2025. U.S. Customs and Border Protection had, by then, already collected the money. Getting it back out has become its own bureaucracy.

Every dollar of IEEPA duty was collected the same way the rest of the tariff system runs: an importer files an entry, a rate applies automatically, the money moves.▸ Reversing that requires CBP to individually re-touch each entry — a process the agency's own courtroom filings show is, three months after the ruling, barely a fifth done.

Of the $166 billion in IEEPA duties CBP says it had collected as of March 4, 2026 — per a sworn declaration filed with the Court of International Trade — only about half, $85 billion, had even entered CBP's new refund system by May 22.▸ Of that $85 billion, CBP had actually certified and sent to the Treasury for disbursement just $20.6 billion — 12 cents of every dollar collected, according to a follow-up declaration filed in a second case at the same court. The rest — $145.4 billion — sits somewhere between "not yet processed" and "under review," three months after the tariffs that raised it were ruled illegal.

CBP didn't build one refund switch; it built 53 million of them.▸ Every import shipment that paid an IEEPA duty is a separate "entry," and — with narrow exceptions — each one has to be individually reopened, recalculated, and certified before a dollar moves.

CBP's own math, laid out in its March 6 declaration, is blunt: clearing an IEEPA duty off a single entry — reviewing it, recalculating it, liquidating it, certifying the refund — takes an Import or Entry Specialist about five minutes.▸ Multiplied across 53,173,939 affected entries, that's 4,431,161 work-hours if done by hand — over 2,100 employee-years of labor squeezed into a court-ordered deadline, using staff CBP says it can't fully divert without abandoning other enforcement work. CBP built an automated shortcut, CAPE, to avoid exactly that; by May 22, ten weeks after CAPE's first phase went live, it had processed refund certifications on 8,515,477 of the 53 million entries — 16%. Of the 330,566 importers who paid IEEPA duties, CBP said in March that only 21,423 had even completed the electronic paperwork required to receive a refund at all.

The pain isn't spread evenly.▸ A March 2026 Center for American Progress analysis found small-business importers paid $306,000 more in tariffs, on average, in the year the IEEPA duties were in effect than the year before — money that, for many of them, is now tied up in the same 88%-unprocessed queue as everyone else's, while larger importers with in-house trade compliance teams file CAPE declarations faster and wait less.

Dollar and entry figures are drawn from sworn CBP declarations filed in two separate Court of International Trade cases and reflect conditions on the dates stated in each filing (March 4–6 and May 22–26, 2026); the refund pipeline has continued to move since. Figures do not include Section 232 or Section 301 tariffs, which the Supreme Court's ruling did not affect.