The Trump administration has yet to announce a process to return fees paid by companies and shoppers for tariffs now deemed illegal.
Dr. Andrew Angel, a physician from Cambridge, Mass., paid a tariff on a $345 pendant he bought last year from an eBay seller in Japan.
Now, after the Supreme Court ruled that one of President Trump’s most widely used tariffs was unlawful, Dr. Angel said he was entitled to a refund.
“The principle is obvious,” he said. “If it was illegal to collect my money, I would certainly like to have my illegally collected money returned to me.”
Like many other shoppers who bought goods overseas in recent months, Dr. Angel paid his tariff to the shipping company that delivered the item, in his case DHL. The company charged him $67 for the customs duty on the pendant, which was a birthday present for his wife, Dr. Irina Angel.
“She loves it. It’s a keeper,” he said.
For years, Americans who bought items from overseas did not have to pay tariffs on items worth $800 or less. Last year, Mr. Trump took away that loophole, known as the de minimis exemption, and shipping companies started demanding that shoppers pay their tariffs before they got their goods. The shipping companies have been paying the duties on behalf of the shoppers to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency that collects tariffs.
Dr. Angel and many like him have the paperwork to prove that they paid tariffs.
That is not case for shoppers who paid higher prices because retailers or other businesses included all or some of the tariff in the final cost of goods. Such shoppers did not pay the customs duties themselves and, according to lawyers, would therefore find it hard to make a claim.
Costco, which has sued the government for its own tariff repayment, signaled during a quarterly earnings call last week that it could cut prices should the company receive a refund.
From the end of August until late November, Customs and Border Protection said, it collected about $400 million in tariffs on the lower-value items that were previously exempt from tariffs. The agency did not provide a more recent tally.
It also did not say how much of those funds came from the tariff that the Supreme Court said was unlawful, known as the IEEPA tariff because Mr. Trump introduced it under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. On all types of imports, the IEEPA tariff has collected over $100 billion, according to U.S. Customs data.
The Supreme Court did not lay out ways in which the government could make tariff repayments, something that lawyers say has been left for lower courts to decide. The Trump administration has tried to slow down the legal fight over refunds, angering those who opposed the tariff.
“That money does not belong to Washington. It belongs to the American people who earned it,” Sara Albrecht, the chairman of the Liberty Justice Center, which represented a set of small-business plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case, said in a statement.
In an interview, Ms. Albrecht said Customs and Border Protection had long had processes to make tariff refunds and could most likely make smaller refunds speedily.
“Those refunds will go out pretty quickly and seamlessly as long as they have good records,” she said.
Because of the legal wrangling, the courts and the government have yet to determine a process to give out refunds. Shipping companies say they will provide details on how to get a refund once they have legal clarity.
In a statement, Isabel Rollison, a spokeswoman for FedEx, said the company would provide both “shippers and consumers” with information on how to get refunds “once next steps are clarified by the government and the court.” FedEx is suing the government to get its refund of the IEEPA tariff.
Natasha Amadi, a spokeswoman for United Parcel Service, said the company would support customers in obtaining refunds of IEEPA tariffs once a legal framework was established, adding that this applied to “customers of all sizes.”
In a statement, Glennah Ivey-Walker, a spokeswoman for DHL, said that when there was legal guidance for the refund process, the company would “communicate with our customers and take appropriate actions.” She declined to comment on Dr. Angel’s tariff payment.
Some shoppers paid tariffs to overseas sellers — not to shipping companies — when buying their goods.
Cynthia David, a retired librarian from Amherst, N.H., bought a paperweight decorated with a harvest mouse on a bramble from an eBay seller in Britain last year. She paid an import charge of 79.50 pounds ($107) — a large sum for an item that cost £160 ($214), but one she was willing to pay because it was a one-off item, she said.
“I love it,” Ms. David said. “It’s dead center in my collection.”
She said she would try to get a refund if eBay made it possible. It is not clear how American shoppers could try to get refunds of tariffs paid to foreign sellers on eBay or other platforms. EBay’s tariffs webpage does not say anything about getting the IEEPA levy repaid, and the company did not respond to requests for comment.
Consumers who have paid tariffs may be able to join class-action lawsuits.
Morgan & Morgan, a law firm, is seeking class-action approval for a suit it filed against FedEx. The suit contends that consumers are entitled not just to tariff refunds from FedEx but also to repayment of the fees the company charged for processing the levy. And it is seeking repayment even before FedEx gets its own tariff refund from the government.
FedEx “collected from us a fee that’s now been determined to be unlawful,” said John A. Yanchunis, a lawyer at Morgan & Morgan. “We’re entitled to that back.”
Ms. Rollison of FedEx did not respond directly to the lawsuit but instead referred to an earlier company statement on tariff refunds that said, in part, “If refunds are issued to FedEx, we will issue refunds to the shippers and consumers who originally bore those charges.”
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