In August 2025, the U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT) ruled that President Joe Biden’s 2022 tariff pause on imported solar panels was illegal, and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) should not have followed it. This ruling meant that retroactive duties would be collected on Southeast Asian solar cells and panels imported between April 2022 and June 2024.
The case was brought to the CIT by Auxin Solar, a small solar panel assembler in California, which claimed the president’s June 2022 executive order was “an abuse of discretion” and tariffs should have been collected. Biden ordered the two-year pause on duty collection to ensure a sufficient supply of solar panels was entering the country to meet domestic electricity generation needs. When the Dept. of Commerce began investigating whether Chinese solar panel manufacturers were working in Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam to circumvent existing antidumping/countervailing duties (AD/CVD) in 2022, supply from the popular import area effectively stopped. The tariff pause allowed panels to continue to be imported between April 1, 2022, and June 6, 2024, without threat of extra taxes.
Then the CIT ordered that tariffs should have been collected during that two-year period, and CBP was required to go back and collect duties on Southeast Asian solar panel imports. During the CIT case, the Dept. of Justice stated there had been approximately 44,000 imported solar products between April 2022 and June 2024. It also estimated that U.S. importers brought in roughly 88.2 GW of solar cells and panels from the four affected countries during that time frame, which could result in over $50 billion in retroactive duties.
One month after CIT’s decision was released, a motion was granted to delay retroactive duty collection until a “final and conclusive judgment and the conclusion of all applicable appeals” is reached. In late October 2025, the Dept. of Commerce and other defendants filed an appeal with the federal appeals court. Conservative estimates say this won’t be sorted for at least another year.
