You probably won’t receive a huge tariff refund.

The largest businesses stand to reap the biggest bucks as the Trump administration begins to return more than $166 billion in duties deemed illegal by the Supreme Court. Even though President Trump’s trade policies have led to higher prices for companies and consumers, many families aren’t in line to benefit directly from the coming refund checks.

The discrepancy is a reflection of the nation’s complicated import laws — and the ever-fluid nature of Mr. Trump’s trade war.

When the government applies taxes to foreign goods, it charges the firms and brokers that bring those items into the country. Those costs proved substantial during the president’s first year back in office, after he imposed a set of so-called reciprocal tariffs on nearly every U.S. trading partner.

But a majority of justices on the nation’s highest court struck down those duties in February, forcing the administration to pay back much of its coveted tariff revenue. As a result, the government owes refunds to the importers on its record books — meaning companies, in many cases — even if those businesses ultimately shifted the costs of Mr. Trump’s taxes on to their customers.

The beneficiaries may include retail giants, such as Costco, Gap, Home Depot, Kohl’s, Lowe’s, Target and Walmart. For some, analysts estimate that the refunds may total into the billions of dollars apiece, leaving them with a choice of whether to keep the money or share it with consumers, even if indirectly in the form of future discounts.

But almost none of those U.S. retailers commented by Thursday on their exact plans. Only Costco promised previously to pass savings on to customers, without explaining how, as the buy-in-bulk company faces one of a series of class-action lawsuits from furious Americans who believe they are owed refunds.

Heather Boushey, who served on the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., described the refund process as a “windfall for businesses,” some of which foisted the tariffs on consumers.

“American families,” she added, “are certainly the losers.”

That could turn the tariff refunds into a divisive political issue, at a moment when a majority of voters have already expressed dissatisfaction with the president’s handling of the economy. Democrats have demanded that the administration return the money to families, but Mr. Trump has opposed returning the money at all — and he suggested this week that it would be “brilliant” if companies chose to forgo repayment.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

For more than a year, Mr. Trump has insisted that foreigners, not Americans, have shouldered the financial burden of his punishing global trade war. But the data has always told a more complicated story, one in which Americans have actually been left to pay a substantial toll.

One measure from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, published in February, estimated that nearly 90 percent of the economic burden from Mr. Trump’s duties had fallen on U.S. companies and consumers. Its findings prompted an unusually harsh rebuke from the White House, which attacked the report’s economists for a conclusion at odds with the president’s beliefs.

Mr. Trump’s tariffs have also threatened to cut into families’ finances. Studying Mr. Trump’s latest rates in April, the Yale Budget Lab, a think tank, estimated that his policies could cause prices to rise as much as 1.1 percent in the short run, which would translate to an annual loss in income of about $1,500 per household. But it cautioned that its analysis rested on a set of assumptions about how Mr. Trump’s rates might evolve.

After Mr. Trump unveiled his highest duties last spring, companies in particular tried a variety of tactics to blunt the financial impact. They slowed imports, reduced staff, paused development, renegotiated deals with suppliers or absorbed the bite of tariffs into their bottom lines. And in some cases, they raised prices.

The costs of Mr. Trump’s trade war proved so staggering that some businesses sued in a bid to recover their money even before the Supreme Court ruled on whether the president had acted illegally. The official refund process commenced only on Monday, and by the government’s own count, the task ahead is monumental. By early March, there were more than 330,000 importers that had paid illegal tariffs on more than 53 million entries, customs officials said.

Some of the refunds may be significant. Walmart, for example, may stand to recover more than $10 billion in previously paid tariffs, according to an analysis this month from Citi Research. Target could be due more than $2 billion, Nike could receive $1 billion, and Home Depot could see a more than $500 million refund, the report found.

Paul Lejuez, a managing director at Citi Research who focuses on department stores, said the estimates did not include interest owed by the government on those refunds. He cautioned that the figures were imprecise calculations derived partly from companies’ financials.

Still, Mr. Lejuez said he expected retailers to face pressure soon from consumers, who want to see companies “show some signs of giving back.”

At least three, FedEx, UPS and DHL, have said they intend to share tariff refunds directly with customers. Frequently, the shipping giants pay tariffs as the official importers for shipped goods, but pass along the charges to the consumers, who placed the orders. Each said it would help customers recover money.

Other businesses have been more circumspect. At an April forum hosted by JPMorgan, John David Rainey, an executive vice president at Walmart, said he expected the big-box retailer to “certainly avail ourselves” of any refund process. But he offered few clues on Walmart’s plans for the money.

“We’ve absorbed a lot of that,” he told investors at the time, referring to the president’s tariffs. “In some cases, we had to pass along that price increase to customers.”

The lack of clarity has prompted some unsatisfied consumers to take matters into their own hands. In recent weeks, they have filed class-action lawsuits against FedEx, UPS and other brands, including Costco and Temu, the low-cost online marketplace, according to state and federal court records.

The lawsuits generally seek to recover money directly for shoppers, claiming that companies do not deserve to profit twice — first by raising prices on consumers, then from collecting federal tariff refunds plus interest.

“The consumer, for all intents and purposes, pays the tariff,” a set of lawyers argued in their lawsuit against Costco, filed in March. They asserted that the company’s pursuit of a refund “constitutes unjust enrichment at the expense” of customers.

David French, the executive vice president of government relations at the National Retail Federation, a lobbying group, said it would be difficult for companies to try to return money directly to consumers because executives cannot simply look at a tariff and “pull out a specific price increase from a retailer’s array of goods.”

But he said he expected some companies to try to give back in other ways. “It may not be a specific item on a receipt that says, ‘This is a tariff refund,’ but you’re going to see the money returned to customers in many cases,” Mr. French said.

Echoing the sentiment last month, Ron M. Vachris, the chief executive of Costco, told shareholders that his retailer would try to “find the best way to return this value to our members through lower prices and better values.” He also said that Costco did not “pass the full cost” of tariffs on to its members, and that calculating the “exact impact” of duties on prices was difficult.

Mr. Trump’s tariffs are expected to change again, as the White House looks to resurrect its previous sky-high rates using another set of trade powers. The president has already imposed a temporary, across-the-board tariff of 10 percent on most imports, using a provision of law that has been challenged in court.

The expected losses from tariffs still represent a sharp departure from the gains that Mr. Trump had once promised to Americans. Initially, the president had said he would return some of the money collected from his duties to families in the form of a rebate check. The idea never gained much traction even among Republicans in Congress, yet the president still pledged repeatedly to offer “a nice dividend to the people,” as he sought to shore up support for his economic agenda.

Mr. Trump does not appear to have mentioned the idea since losing at the Supreme Court, yet many Democrats have started to demand that his administration compensate families.

On Thursday, a group of Democratic lawmakers including Representatives Steven Horsford of Nevada and Suzan DelBene of Washington asked the top executives of Walmart, Target and other companies to ensure the coming tariff refunds “reach those who ultimately bore those costs.”

“American families felt the impact of these tariffs in everyday life,” they wrote in a letter. “The question of how refunds are distributed is one of corporate accountability and economic fairness.”

President Trump provoked a broad backlash this week when he posted a transcript from a right-wing podcast in which the host referred to China and India as “hellhole” places and said recent immigrants from those countries had not “integrated” into America as “European Americans” had.

The transcript, which Mr. Trump posted on his Truth Social account on Wednesday night, came from a recent episode of “The Savage Nation,” hosted by Michael Savage, a popular conservative talk radio host. Mr. Trump also posted the original video clip of Mr. Savage’s podcast.

The president did not add any commentary to his posts, but across Asia and the United States, many people saw an unwelcome message that demanded a response.

In a rare public rebuke of the White House, the Indian government took to X to criticize the comments, calling them “obviously uninformed, inappropriate and in poor taste” without explicitly naming Mr. Trump.

Asian American advocacy groups and some Democratic lawmakers faulted Mr. Trump for amplifying xenophobic rhetoric at a time when the administration’s efforts to restrict even legal immigration have left many Indian Americans and Chinese Americans worried about their place in American society.

“We are deeply disturbed by @POTUS sharing this hateful, racist screed targeting Indian and Chinese Americans,” said the Hindu American Foundation, a group that has been critical of both Democrats and Republicans, in a statement on X. “Endorsing such rants as the president of the United States will further stoke hatred and endanger our communities, at a time when xenophobia and racism are already at an all time high.”

The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Mr. Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, are scheduled to meet for a summit in Beijing in mid-May.

The podcast excerpt shared by Mr. Trump was recorded shortly after the Supreme Court hearing on Mr. Trump’s executive order seeking to ban birthright citizenship, which confers citizenship on nearly all children born on U.S. soil and has long been seen as a fundamental tenet of American identity and law.

In the clip, Mr. Savage claimed, without evidence, that recent immigrants had “almost no loyalty” to America; that the nation was being “overrun with Chinese coming here just to drop a baby on our shores to then bring in the entire family”; and that Indians and Chinese had set up “internal mechanisms” so that only people from their countries could get tech jobs in California.

“A baby here becomes an instant citizen, and then they bring the entire family in from China or India or some other hellhole on the planet,” Mr. Savage said.

“They’re not like the European Americans of today and their ancestors,” he added.

Mr. Trump’s post comes as the Supreme Court weighs the constitutionality of his executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship for babies born to undocumented people and to some temporary foreign visitors. Mr. Trump has made rolling back birthright citizenship central to his campaign to expel millions of immigrants from the United States. He even attended the oral arguments at the Supreme Court where, to his dismay, some of the conservative justices appeared skeptical of the president’s position.

Earlier on Wednesday, before he posted the podcast transcript, Mr. Trump had said in a separate Truth Social post that “certain” conservative justices on the Supreme Court had “gone weak, stupid, and bad.” He mentioned the birthright citizenship case, which the court is expected to decide this summer.

On Thursday, a spokesman for the White House, Kush Desai, defended Mr. Trump’s post of the transcript, saying that the president was “calling out the scam of unfettered birthright citizenship.”

In recent years, Asians have been the fastest-growing group in the country, and people from India and China have accounted for the bulk of that increase. In 2023, Asians made up about 7 percent of the national population. By some measures, immigrants from India and China and their descendants have been among the most successful groups in the United States, with high levels of education and income.

But as the Trump administration has sought to limit most immigration pathways, both groups have also come under increasing scrutiny. The administration’s changes to the H-1B program, a skilled worker visa that is especially popular among Indians, have fueled racist rhetoric targeting the Indian community across the country.

The president’s push to end birthright citizenship has also spurred more debate over birth tourism, a term that refers to pregnant women who travel to the United States to give birth so that their baby can have American citizenship. It is most commonly associated with a cottage industry of “maternity hotels” that has emerged over the past two decades and caters to wealthy families from countries like China.

The phenomenon of birth tourism is not believed to be widespread. In its most recent estimate in 2020, the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that supports restricting immigration, put the number at around 20,000 to 26,000 babies a year — less than 1 percent of the number of babies born in the country. Nonetheless, birth tourism has become a frequent talking point for conservatives seeking to eliminate birthright citizenship for all.

Some Democratic lawmakers also criticized Mr. Trump for sharing the podcast transcript.

Representative Grace Meng, a Taiwanese American Democrat from New York and chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, said in a statement that she was “disgusted” by the post.

“At a time when hate incidents against South Asian communities are surging, and one in four Americans view Chinese Americans as a threat,” she said, “amplifying this kind of bigotry pours fuel on an already dangerous fire and must be unequivocally condemned.”

Representative Ami Bera, an Indian American Democrat from California, described Mr. Trump’s comments in a post on X as “offensive, ignorant, and beneath the dignity of the office he holds.”

Mr. Desai, the White House spokesman, is Indian American. He said the president’s relationship with the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, was evidence of his support for people from India. “Everyone besides the failing legacy media knows that President Trump has a strong friendship with Prime Minister Modi and loves patriotic Indian Americans who were an important bloc in the historic coalition that fueled his landslide 2024 election victory,” he said.

Other prominent figures in the Trump administration of Indian or Chinese descent include Harmeet K. Dhillon, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights; Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director; Steven Cheung, the White House communications director; and Usha Vance, the wife of Vice President JD Vance.

Asked at a Turning Point USA event in Georgia last week about the H-1B visa program, Mr. Vance referred to his own in-laws to argue that while naturalized citizens should prioritize American interests over those of their ancestral country, many immigrants had also brought value to America.

“Look, I am married to the daughter of immigrants from India,” Mr. Vance said. “And I love my in-laws, and they’re great people and they’ve been great contributors to the United States of America.”