Pritzker pens letter to Trump, seeking tariff refunds

CHICAGO — After the U.S. Treasury paid out $100 billion in tariff refunds to corporations at the end of last month, Gov. JB Pritzker wants to know where Illinois’ cut is.

In a letter sent to President Donald Trump on Thursday, Pritzker asked the president to send direct payments of $1,700 to Illinois families. He also encouraged Trump to stop seeking new ways to enforce tariffs and to support legislation that would require corporations to pass refund relief back to consumers.

“There is no portal to request a refund for a mother in Rockford buying groceries for her children,” Pritzker wrote. “There is no trade attorney representing a retiree in Carbondale paying off their mortgage. There is no check coming in for the farmer in Champaign who had to pay more for his equipment.”

The money reimbursed as of July was about 60% of the total $166 billion owed to U.S. companies after the Supreme Court struck down the Trump administration’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, in February, finding that the law did not authorize the president to unilaterally impose tariffs. 

The refunds for the unconstitutionally collected tariffs have so far reportedly included $2.2 billion to Apple and $600 million to Amazon, and Walmart says it is owed an estimated $2.4 billion in refunds. 

Those companies have made pledges to either issue partial refunds to customers who paid higher prices as a result of the tariffs, to generally cut prices, or to “reinvest” the money into U.S. manufacturing, but there is no mechanism to ensure that the higher costs passed on to consumers are routed back to them.

Consumer relief proposals face obstacles

Pritzker encouraged Trump to support the Tariff Relief for Consumers Act, a bill that would require companies receiving refunds to lower prices paid by consumers on household goods that were affected by the illegal tariffs. 

However, the bill has seen no movement in Congress since it was introduced in March, and the process for determining the costs incurred by consumers would be made nearly impossible due to the multiple rounds and intermittent nature of the tariffs.

Trump himself said on social media late last year that “A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high-income people!) will be paid to everyone,” to return money collected from tariffs back to consumers, though no such checks materialized. 

Tariffs ongoing

But even while his administration is paying out refunds from the illegal tariffs levied last year, the Trump administration is still looking for new ways to get the courts to accept his approach to tariffs.

The initial round of tariffs levied illegally under the IEEPA framework ranged from 10-50% on nearly all U.S. global trading partners. Before Trump, no U.S. president had previously attempted to use IEEPA — designed to give the president the power to regulate international commerce in response to national security emergencies — to impose tariffs.

Hours after the court declared those tariffs illegal, the administration imposed a new 10% tariff under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, a temporary, 150-day measure to be used in a balance-of-payments emergency, where the value of the U.S. dollar is at such a crisis level that the country cannot meet its international payment obligations.

The U.S. Court of International Trade in May ruled that Trump’s use of Section 122 tariffs was also illegal, but declined to issue nationwide relief.

States challenge new ‘forced labor’ tariffs

But despite the repeated rulings, the administration took a third swing at new tariffs after the Section 122 tariffs expired last month, this time saying the tariffs are necessary to combat forced labor in global trade.

Twenty-five states, including Illinois, sued the administration on Monday over the new round, which imposes tariffs of 10-12.5% on 60 economies that provide over 99% of American imports. The states called the invocation of forced labor a “pretext to continue its illegal tariff scheme.”

“For the third time, I stand with my colleagues across the country to fight the Trump administration’s illegal tariffs,” Attorney General Kwame Raoul said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. “The Court of International Trade and the U.S. Supreme Court have already found the Trump tariffs to be unlawful, and we are confident we will prevail this third time.”

Acute pain in Illinois

A July report by the nonpartisan research Midwest Economic Policy Institute and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Project for Middle Class Renewal found even broader harms of the tariffs on six Midwest states, including Illinois.

The states make up 19% of U.S. manufacturing and 20% of agricultural outputs, making them particularly vulnerable to retaliatory tariffs from countries reacting to Trump’s tariff regime.

In Illinois, that translated to an average $2,200 increase in costs per household, 7,500 lost manufacturing jobs and a $5 billion drop in GDP, according to the report.

That pain was felt most acutely by low-income households. For those in the bottom 10% of households by income — those making $15,100 or less — the tariffs added an average $800 in costs for the year, meaning the new tariffs ate up 5% of income for Illinois’ poorest households. 

Pritzker’s letter to Trump this month followed an earlier one he sent in February after the Supreme Court ruled the tariffs illegal, attaching an invoice of $8.6 million and instructing Trump to, “Cut the check.”

The invoice “was past-due then,” Pritzker wrote in Thursday’s letter. “The invoice remains unpaid. Illinois families are still waiting.”

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.

This article first appeared on Capitol News Illinois and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Maggie Daugherty, Capitol News Illinois

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Maggie Daugherty joined the Capitol News Illinois newsroom in November 2025 as a Chicago beat reporter.

Daugherty is a 2021 graduate of The College of Wooster, where she received her bachelor's degree in international relations and economics, and a 2025 graduate of the Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, where she received her master's degree in Investigative Journalism.

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