Not legal advice. If your clients are pursuing duty refund claims or adjusting their filing posture based on the IEEPA ruling, direct them to licensed customs counsel. Facts in this post are sourced from published trade press and public court reporting as of May 2026.
Your inbox is getting hit from two directions right now. Importers are asking whether they can get money back. Shippers are asking what the current tariff rates actually are. Those are two different questions and they require two different answers.
What did the Supreme Court rule on IEEPA tariffs?
On February 20, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 6-3 ruling in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, held that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize the President to impose tariffs. The taxing power belongs to Congress, and IEEPA’s language does not clearly delegate it.
The ruling invalidated the “Liberation Day” reciprocal tariffs that had been in effect through 2025 and into 2026, including rates as high as 145% on Chinese imports, the 25% fentanyl-related tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods, and the baseline 10% tariff on all imports. Customs and Border Protection had collected an estimated $160 to $175 billion in IEEPA tariff revenue before the ruling.
What did not change: Section 232 tariffs on steel, aluminum, heavy trucks, auto parts, and copper are still in effect. The suspension of de minimis treatment for sub-$800 shipments remains in place.
What tariffs replaced the IEEPA tariffs?
By Friday afternoon, the White House had already moved. The President terminated the IEEPA tariffs and invoked Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, imposing a new temporary import surcharge. It started at 10%, reached 15% by Saturday, and applies globally, with exemptions for USMCA-compliant goods from Canada and Mexico, certain energy products, pharmaceuticals, and goods already covered by Section 232.
Section 122 caps the surcharge at 15% and limits the duration to 150 days. That clock expires on July 24, 2026. If Congress does not extend it and no replacement authority is in place, the rate drops to zero on many of the world’s most traded goods. If the administration deploys Section 232 or Section 301 replacements before then, there will be another adjustment cycle.
For your clients and shippers, the tariff environment is not resolved. It is just operating under different legal authority, with an expiration date.
Can importers get refunds on IEEPA tariffs they paid?
The Court did not order automatic refunds. Justice Kavanaugh, in dissent, warned that the refund process is “likely to be a mess.” He was correct.
Importers paid estimated duties on entry. CBP has a 314-day window to “liquidate” each entry and make the duty amount final. Once an entry liquidates without a protest on file, the amount is locked. Refund rights for liquidated entries depend on whether the importer filed a timely protest or obtained a court-ordered suspension of liquidation before the entry closed.
More than 1,500 companies had already filed protective lawsuits at the U.S. Court of International Trade before the ruling. Costco, Revlon, Kawasaki, and roughly 2,000 others were in that group. They have a path to pursue refunds. Importers who did not file in time face a more difficult road, and the CIT will now determine how those cases proceed.
The protest window under standard CBP procedures is 180 days from liquidation. For entries already liquidated, that window may have closed. Your clients’ customs attorneys need to review their specific entries against the liquidation dates before drawing any conclusions about what is recoverable.
What should a freight forwarder do about the IEEPA ruling?
Your clients do not necessarily know the difference between IEEPA tariffs, Section 232 tariffs, Section 122 surcharges, and liquidation deadlines. They know they paid a lot in duties over the past year and a half and they saw a news headline about a court ruling.
A few things to do now:
Know what your clients imported and when. Before you can tell any importer whether they have a refund opportunity, you need entry dates, HTS codes, and an understanding of which tariff lines those entries were classified under. Your TMS has this. If it does not, the ACE portal does.
Do not give legal opinions. What you can say: “We are reviewing which entries were classified under IEEPA-affected codes and can flag the relevant ones for your customs attorney.” What you cannot say: “You probably have a claim.”
Communicate clearly about current rates. The 15% Section 122 surcharge is in effect now. USMCA-compliant Canada and Mexico shipments are excluded. Section 232 goods are excluded. Everything else is subject to the surcharge. Shippers planning shipments over the next 60 days need to know this.
Flag the July 24 expiration. The Section 122 surcharge expires in roughly two months. What replaces it is unknown. Clients with long lead times on import orders need to be planning for that uncertainty.
Connect refund-eligible clients to trade counsel immediately. The protest deadline is 180 days from liquidation. For entries near that cutoff, time is short.
How do forwarders pull entry documents for refund claims fast?
A protest filing or refund claim requires original entry summaries, commercial invoices, packing lists, and HTS classification evidence. For shipments from 2025, that documentation exists somewhere. Finding it under inbox pressure is where things break down.
The forwarders who handle this cleanly will be the ones whose job records are tied to their email history well enough that pulling documents for a specific entry takes minutes. If your current workflow has that material spread across email threads, network drives, and TMS notes with no reliable link between them, this is the moment that surfaces the gap.
Managing the inquiry volume that comes with events like this is exactly the kind of problem TIO was built for: routing client questions to the right job record, surfacing the relevant document history, and keeping your team working a queue instead of digging through an inbox. If you want to see how that works with your TMS setup, book a demo.
Frequently asked questions
What is the IEEPA tariff ruling and what changed for freight forwarders?
The Supreme Court struck down tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act on February 20, 2026. New tariffs replaced them the same day under separate statutory authority. For freight forwarders, the ruling created a window for duty refund claims on affected entries and triggered a surge of client inquiries about classification, routing alternatives, and landed cost changes.
Can importers claim refunds on tariffs paid under the IEEPA structure?
Entries affected by the ruling may be eligible for duty refund through CBP's protest process. The protest deadline is 180 days from the date of liquidation of the entry. Importers with entries approaching that cutoff should consult licensed customs counsel immediately. The forwarder's role is locating original entry documentation, not filing the protest.
What is the Section 122 surcharge expiration on July 24, 2026?
Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 authorized temporary import surcharges currently in place. Those surcharges are set to expire July 24, 2026. Whether they drop, get extended, or get replaced with Section 301 or Section 232 coverage is unknown. The date creates another round of shipper inquiries and rerouting requests for freight forwarders.
How should freight forwarders prepare their back office for tariff-driven RFQ surges?
The preparation that matters most is compressing response time on individual RFQs. When 20 quote requests arrive the same day, the forwarders who respond within two hours take the bookings. That requires reducing the inbox-coordination time per RFQ, not just having access to rates, since reading the email and extracting the lane details is where time actually goes.