The news: US Customs and Border Protection has now sent about $86.3 billion of the $121.75 billion in accepted refund claims to Treasury for disbursement, as courts unwind the tariffs collected under the emergency-powers authority that was ruled unlawful.
A federal court has also ordered CBP to clear the last category of refunds it had refused to process. The catch: that order covers only importers who sued.
The numbers: The figures come from a sworn declaration CBP filed with the Court of International Trade, and they have jumped since our last read, when about $71 billion had been paid against $104 billion accepted.
The program covers more than 330,000 importers and tens of millions of entries, part of roughly $166 billion collected before the tariffs were struck down, per CBP data cited across the litigation.
The order: The court directed CBP to reliquidate entries that were finally liquidated, or that had sat more than 80 days, without the emergency duties.
That is the exact bucket we flagged earlier as having no refund path through CBP's portal. It now has one, but only for the roughly 3,700 plaintiffs in the case, whose lawyers must first hand CBP their importer-of-record numbers. Importers who never sued still have no path.
Who is waiting: The money is not arriving evenly. Approved refunds cover about 60% of the dollars owed but only about 30% of the entries, meaning large importers are being paid first while smaller ones wait longest. A separate snag is self-inflicted: 9,837 refunds are stuck, up from 8,384 a few weeks earlier, because those importers have not given CBP the bank-account details needed to send the money.
What's next: A class-certification motion in a related case could extend the finally-liquidated path to importers who did not individually sue. The government's opposition is due next week. Until a court rules on it, the dividing line for the last tranche of refunds is whether an importer became a plaintiff.
