US Customs and Border Protection cannot process billions of dollars in tariff refunds because its digital import system is not built for the job. CBP executive director Brandon Lord said as much in a Friday court filing, describing the agency's infrastructure as 'not well suited to a task of this scale.'
The refunds exist because the Supreme Court struck down Trump's IEEPA tariffs last month, and the International Trade Court this week ruled impacted importers are entitled to repayment with interest. CBP is now caught between a legal obligation and a system that cannot execute it.
The full filing reveals how the agency's technical limitations are being used as an argument against compliance, which is the detail worth reading closely. The gap between what the courts are ordering and what the government says it can physically do is where this story gets complicated.
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