How to navigate the new tariff landscape

By Zander Brekke, BridgeTower Media Newswires

If you import goods, or buy from vendors who do, the past year has been a crash course in trade law that nobody signed up for. Sweeping tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) added as much as 145 percent to the cost of goods imported from China and significant duties on imports from dozens of other countries. Vendors scrambled to absorb costs, passed surcharges to retailers, raised prices, or some combination of all three. Retailers either swallowed the increases or passed them to consumers where they could.

Then, on Feb. 20, the Supreme Court ruled that those tariffs were unlawful. Now, the refunds are beginning — for some.

Who Gets a Tariff Refund?

This April, U.S. Customs and Border Protection launched a new electronic portal called CAPE (Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries) to process refund claims for IEEPA duties paid between April 2025 and February 2026. Approximately $166 billion in IEEPA duties were collected from more than 330,000 importers across 53 million shipments. Only the Importer of Record, the company that actually paid the duty to Customs, is entitled to a refund. That means the refunds flow to importers: the vendors and brands who sourced goods from overseas and paid duties at the border. Retailers and consumers have no direct claim through this process.

Refunds are not automatic. Importers must affirmatively opt in, navigate the new CAPE system, and wait for CBP to process and approve their claims. For importers who qualify, the steps are concrete and require prompt action. CBP has placed the burden squarely on importers, and it is up to each eligible business to satisfy the administrative requirements and pursue its own refund.

The Trickle-Down Question

For retailers and consumers, the picture is less clear, and it’s playing out in courtrooms across the country.

The reality is that many importers absorbed a meaningful portion of IEEPA tariffs themselves, squeezing margins and delaying price increases as long as they could. Others passed a portion of those costs downstream through surcharges or higher pricing, often with little choice given the scale of the duties involved.

Now that refunds are flowing back to importers, the question of what happens next is unsettled. Retailers and consumers didn’t pay the IEEPA tariffs directly but did pay them indirectly in the form of higher prices or surcharges — a fact plaintiff’s attorneys are starting to take note of. A number of class action lawsuits have been filed against companies, including Costco and FedEx, with plaintiffs arguing unjust enrichment, that companies unfairly received a benefit at consumers’ expense.

Whether downstream parties, like retailers who paid tariff surcharges or consumers who paid higher prices, have any legal entitlement to a share of those refunds is a question the courts are only beginning to address. What is certain is that refunds flow to the Importer of Record first, and the legal and commercial questions surrounding pass-through liability are likely to be an ongoing issue for importers, vendors, and retailers to navigate for some time to come.

What’s Still in Effect

The Supreme Court’s ruling struck down IEEPA tariffs specifically — it did not dismantle the broader tariff landscape. Existing Section 301 tariffs on Chinese goods, Section 232 tariffs on steel, aluminum, and other materials, and a new 10 percent global tariff under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 all remain in effect, though the Section 122 tariff faces ongoing legal challenges and is set to expire on July 24, 2026.

More significantly, the administration has indicated that it intends to restore tariff rates to their previous levels, this time through Section 301 authority, which stands on considerably stronger legal ground than IEEPA. In March 2026, the U.S. Trade Representative launched new Section 301 investigations targeting major trading partners, including China, the EU, Japan, India, Mexico, and Vietnam. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signaled in April that tariff rates could be back to their previous levels by early July. The China tariffs from Trump’s first term, still in effect today, were imposed under this same authority and have survived legal challenge.

The IEEPA chapter may be closing, but the broader tariff story is far from over.

Zander Brekke is a Georgia-licensed attorney who has sat on both sides of the table — first as a corporate president and in-house counsel in the consumer products industry, now as the founder of A. Brekke Law Group. He represents vendors, brands, retailers, and executives navigating the legal and regulatory challenges that come with building and running a consumer products business.