Catenaa, Friday, February 20, 2026- The US Supreme Court ruled on Friday that President Trump didn’t have legal authority to impose duties under an emergency law, with $170 billion in tariff refunds at stake.

Among the major questions left unanswered for US importers are the prospects and the process for recouping the money the government collected over the past year under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

The vote was 6-3 against the Trump administration, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh writing in dissent.

“The court says nothing today about whether, and if so how, the government should go about returning the billions of dollars that it has collected from importers,” Kavanaugh wrote. “But that process is likely to be a ‘mess,’ as was acknowledged” during the court’s oral arguments in November.

US Customs and Border Protection has so far collected an estimated $170 billion in tariffs imposed by Trump using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the law at the center of the case, as of December 14.

The court ruled that using IEEPA to impose tariffs wasn’t lawful, but the justices didn’t address whether importers are entitled to refunds, leaving it to a lower court to sort out those issues.

The litigation will return to the US Court of International Trade for the next round of legal wrangling.

While waiting for the justices to rule, more than 1,500 companies have filed their own tariff lawsuits in the trade court to put themselves in line for tariff refunds, according to a Bloomberg analysis.

The trade court in recent months has pressed the Justice Department for at least a hint of how it plans to handle the refund issue if it loses at the Supreme Court.

The scale of Trump’s contested tariffs is far larger. By the end of 2025, the government told the trade court that more than 300,000 importers had paid the contested tariffs so far.