On Monday (US time), a federal appeals court in the US rejected the Donald Trump administration’s bid to push back the process of refunding billions of dollars’ worth of tariffs after the US Supreme Court struck the duties down as illegal last month.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s new setback for the Trump administration comes after the Justice Department requested the Federal Circuit to wait 90 days before issuing the mandate “to allow the political branches an opportunity to consider options.”

However, lawyers countering the Trump admin wrote in a court filing (signed off by Indian-American lawyer Neal Kumar Katyal) Monday morning, “Nothing about the refund issue warrants any delay in issuing this Court’s mandate, let alone a staggering three months’ delay,” adding “the proper time to issue the mandate is now.”

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Trump admin’s attempt to delay tariff refunds

The Department of Justice (DOJ) had previously estimated that it could take years for the refund process to play out. On February 20, the US Supreme Court’s decision to rule that Trump’s sweeping tariffs on most countries were illegal paved the way for importers who paid them to seek refunds.

The court’s 6-3 ruling declared that the US president was not authorised to impose tariffs as per the federal emergency powers law known as International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA.

According to calculations by the Penn Wharton Budget Model, the US government had collected more than $130 billion from the tariffs by mid-December 2025. Additionally, firm PwC indicated that total tariff collections in India’s case were estimated to be $487 million till October 2025.

Lawsuits against Trump admin over tariff refunds

The Supreme Court ruling effectively set off a flurry of lawsuits from both large and small businesses seeking refunds of the import duties they have paid. The companies included here are FedEx, Revlon, Costco, Dyson Inc., Dollar General Corp., Bausch & Lomb Inc., Brooks Brothers, and Sol de Janeiro USA Inc and more.

As per the Associated Press, most of the lawsuits filed in the US Court of International Trade to recoup costs from the tariffs were already being processed ahead of the Supreme Court decision in February.

Just days ago, a Bloomberg report estimated that the with more than 100 companies joining on the legal action against the Trump admin, the total number of tariff lawsuits had gone well above 2,000. Most of the companies suing the administration have been smaller businesses.

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Indian-origin lawyer backing small businesses

Taking to his official X account, Neal Katyal, who is one of the attorneys representing small businesses, wrote on X Monday: “Update. The Court in our tariffs case has just rejected the Government’s delay tactic with tariff refunds. We will be proceeding immediately to get the refunds Americans are owed.”

Having argued against Trump’s use of the 977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose tariffs, Katyal wrote in a late February op-ed for The Washington Post: “The government cannot tell courts that refunds are simple and inevitable when seeking relief — and then imply they are complex and distant when the time comes to pay. The rule of law does not operate on shifting premises. If judicial assurances are treated as temporary litigation tactics rather than binding commitments, the institutional credibility of the United States suffers.”