NPR.

How do we get our money back?

Business owners have wondered this for two months now, ever since the Supreme Court ruled that most of last year's tariffs set by the Trump administration were illegal.

That's an estimated $166 billion due in refunds.

At first, the government argued it might not be able to refund the tariffs at all.

Then, it seemed, businesses might have to sue for their money. But then,

in a matter of weeks, came a website from U.S. Customs, where importers can at least try to get

their refunds. It went live this week.

This is the indicator for plan of money. I'm Adrienne Ma. And we have NPR business correspondent Alina Selyuk here,

because you're introducing us to three small business owners, who are three among the tens of thousands

racing to get their tariff refunds. So early on, as Trump administration officials argued that refunds would be very difficult to do, many business owners were really confused because tariff refunds actually happen all the time.

Right. There's already this web portal called ACE, A-C-E. And it's like a website where importers can have an account that keeps track of all their customs duties.

And if there's an error, they can raise a flag for the government to take another look and maybe refund anything that the business overpaid at the border.

And so it made perfect sense when U.S. Customs eventually did say, okay, we'll use this

existing system for mass scale tariff refunds, but we'll have a new tool inside the system,

specifically for claims related to Trump's tariffs that got rejected by the Supreme Court.

That portal is called CAPE.

And it stands for consolidated administration and processing of entries.

Just rolls off the tongue.

I will quiz you on this at the end.

And so this CAPE tool, it opened for the first phase of claims on Monday.

And not all imports qualified quite yet,

...