Section 301 Refund Claims After the HMTX Ruling: What Brokers Must File by September 4

Brokers with clients holding suspended Section 301 protests just got the answer nobody wanted, and now there is a calendar deadline attached to it.

For years, thousands of importers preserved refund claims tied to the Section 301 tariffs on Chinese goods, betting that a favorable ruling on the List 3 and List 4A modifications would eventually put money back on the table. That bet is over. On June 15, 2026, the Supreme Court denied certiorari in HMTX Industries LLC v. United States, letting stand the Federal Circuit's ruling that USTR had authority to impose those tariffs. The Court of International Trade followed with an order, issued July 6, 2026, that tells every plaintiff still sitting in a stayed China Section 301 case exactly what happens next.

What changed

Before this order, thousands of Section 301 cases sat administratively stayed at CIT, waiting on the Supreme Court to resolve HMTX. Now that the Court has declined to hear it, the CIT is clearing its docket. Plaintiffs have two paths, and the choice has to be made in writing:

• File a status report with CIT by September 4, 2026, if the case includes claims the Supreme Court's ruling did not reach.
• Consent to dismissal, with no status report required, if there is nothing left to litigate.

There is not a third option. A case that goes quiet without a status report is headed toward dismissal on the government's terms, not the importer's.

Who this affects

Any importer who filed or joined a Section 301 test case, or preserved a protest tied to the List 3/4A litigation, is affected. That is a broad population. It caught US importers of Chinese-origin goods across nearly every sector that fell under Lists 3 or 4A when USTR expanded the tariff schedule between 2018 and 2019. The practical reality now: the government keeps what it collected under those lists. There is no refund coming from this litigation track.

What to do at the entry level

This is a filing deadline problem before it is anything else. For every client with a preserved Section 301 claim tied to HMTX, a broker needs to know, case by case:

1. Whether the client's case, or the test case it rode along with, carries claims beyond what the Supreme Court addressed. If yes, counsel needs a status report on file with CIT before September 4.
2. Whether the client actually wants to keep litigating a claim with no refund upside, or would rather consent to dismissal and close the file.
3. Whether any entries still open, not yet liquidated or liquidated but within the protest window, carry exposure independent of the dismissed HMTX claims.

None of this is a rate change or a new duty. It is a documentation and deadline problem, and those are exactly the kind of gaps that turn into disputes later, when someone asks a broker to show why a claim was or was not preserved. TTI's trade alert feed tracks CIT and USTR actions like this one as they post, with a citation and a verification date attached to each entry, so a broker can point to the record instead of reconstructing it from memory when a client asks six months from now. The TTI blog follows the docket forward from here, since a status-report deadline in early September rarely stays quiet through August.

The broader pattern

This ruling closes one avenue, not the whole Section 301 program. USTR's four-year statutory review process continues independently, and product-specific exclusion requests remain a live channel for relief on specific tariff lines. Brokers advising clients on China-origin entries should treat HMTX's resolution as one data point in an active docket, not the final word on Section 301 exposure. TTI's customs broker resources track these adjacent developments, since duty-stacking questions on Section 301 goods rarely stay static for long.

The immediate task is narrower: identify which clients have a September 4 deadline, get status reports filed or dismissals consented to, and document the decision either way. A missed deadline here does not just lose a refund shot that was probably gone anyway. It removes the client's ability to control how the case closes.

Start tracking corridor-specific alerts like this one before they turn into deadline problems: sign up for TTI.

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