The IEEPA Tariff Refund Window Is Already Closing — Even for Protests – File ASAP

When the Supreme Court held in February 2026 that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) does not authorize the President to impose tariffs, the headlines focused on a single, simple takeaway: importers who paid IEEPA duties may be entitled to refunds. That is true. What the headlines largely missed is the calendar problem sitting underneath it. For the oldest entries — and there are a great many of them — the IEEPA tariff refund deadline Window is not opening. It is closing.

If your company filed entries subject to the IEEPA tariffs in early 2025, some of your refund rights have very likely already expired, and more are expiring every day. The reason is liquidation finality, and the math is unforgiving.

The 180-Day Protest Deadline Is a Jurisdictional Wall

Every customs refund claim runs through the same clock. When U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) liquidates an entry, liquidation becomes the final computation of duties owed. From the date of liquidation, an importer has 180 days to file a protest under 19 U.S.C. § 1514. On day 181, the right to protest is gone.

This is not a soft deadline. There is no extension, no waiver, and no hardship exception. Courts treat the 180-day protest period as jurisdictional. Once it lapses on an entry that was not protested, suspended, extended, or otherwise kept open, that entry is final — and finality is the wall that separates importers who recover their IEEPA duties from those who do not.

Why “494 Days” Is the Number That Should Worry You

Under CBP’s ordinary practice, an entry liquidates roughly 314 days after the date of entry. Add the 180-day protest period that begins at liquidation, and you arrive at a working outer boundary:

314 days (entry to liquidation) + 180 days (protest period) = 494 days from entry

In other words, under the standard timeline, an importer has about 494 days from the date an entry is filed before the protest channel on that entry closes for good.

The first IEEPA tariffs took effect on February 4, 2025. As of today, that date is more than 494 days in the past. Entries filed in those first days of the IEEPA regime have, on the ordinary timeline, already liquidated and already run out their protest windows. They have crossed the finality line. And because liquidation and the protest clock march forward day by day, the same thing is now happening on a rolling basis to entries from March 2025, April 2025, and every month that followed.

Two cautions make this worse, not better:

• Accelerated liquidations. The 314-day figure is customary, not guaranteed. Some entries liquidate sooner. Where that happened, the 180-day protest deadline arrived earlier than 494 days — meaning some entries are already final ahead of the schedule above.
• Volume. Any importer who brought in goods regularly through 2025 — particularly Chinese- or Hong Kong-origin goods subject to the IEEPA duties from the very beginning — may have dozens or hundreds of entries, each with its own liquidation date and its own deadline. They do not expire all at once. They expire one shipment at a time.

How the CAPE Refund Process Works — and the 80-Day Cliff Inside It

To handle a staggering volume — by the government’s own account, roughly $166 billion in IEEPA duties across more than 53 million entries — CBP built an automated refund tool inside the ACE Portal called the Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries, or CAPE. Rather than handling refunds entry by entry, the importer of record (or the licensed broker who filed the entries) uploads a single “CAPE Declaration” — essentially a CSV list of entry numbers. CBP then strips the IEEPA Chapter 99 duties, recalculates the entry, liquidates or reliquidates it, and issues a consolidated refund with interest by ACH.

CAPE is the fastest route to a refund, but its first phase reaches only two categories of entries:

• Unliquidated entries, which carry no time limit while they remain open; and
• Entries liquidated within the preceding 80 days — measured from the liquidation date to the date the CAPE Declaration is submitted.

That 80-day figure is not arbitrary, and it is exactly where importers get caught. CBP set it to sit inside the 90-day voluntary reliquidation window under 19 U.S.C. § 1501, leaving the agency roughly ten days to process and reliquidate an entry before its own voluntary-reliquidation authority expires at day 90. Two consequences are easy to overlook:

• The clock runs to your submission date, not to a fixed calendar deadline. An entry that is comfortably eligible today can fall outside the CAPE window within weeks simply because you waited to file. Because 2025 entries are liquidating on rolling dates throughout 2026, eligible entries should be compiled and filed promptly, in batches, as they liquidate.
• Once an entry passes the 80-day mark, CAPE Phase 1 will no longer accept it, and it does not roll automatically onto any other track. CBP has indicated that later phases may eventually cover more entries, but it has committed to no timeline — and, as discussed below, the government is actively contesting whether it must refund finally liquidated entries at all.

If You Miss the CAPE Deadline, File a Protest

For an entry that has passed the 80-day CAPE cutoff but is still within 180 days of liquidation, the protest is the move. A protest under 19 U.S.C. § 1514 — filed on CBP Form 19 through ACE within 180 days of the liquidation date — does the one thing that matters most: it prevents the liquidation from becoming final and preserves the importer’s right to recover the IEEPA duties on that entry. The grounds are straightforward: the IEEPA duties were assessed without lawful authority under the Supreme Court’s decision, and the protest should request reliquidation without the IEEPA Chapter 99 duties, plus a refund with interest. The importer of record may file, or a customs broker or attorney may file on its behalf, and protests can often be consolidated to cover multiple qualifying entries at the same port.

A few practical points govern how the protest and CAPE tracks interact:

• A protested entry is not eligible for CAPE while the protest is pending. Filing a protest moves the entry out of the automated lane and into the slower protest channel. For an entry nearing finality, that is the correct trade-off — preservation beats speed — but it means you should not protest an entry that still qualifies for CAPE.
• You can switch tracks while you still have room. If a protest was filed solely to recover IEEPA duties and the entry remains within 80 days of liquidation, the importer may withdraw the protest and add the entry to a CAPE Declaration for faster processing.
• A protest is not a lawsuit. It is a separate administrative step and is not a substitute for a suit at the Court of International Trade under 28 U.S.C. § 1581(i). For entries at or past finality — where CBP’s current position is that it cannot refund without a court order — a timely protest may not be enough on its own, and importers should evaluate filing in the CIT to fully preserve their rights. The lead judge overseeing the IEEPA refund cases has expressly reminded importers to be mindful of their Section 1514 protest remedies in the meantime.

Don’t Assume the Court Orders or the Refund Portal Will Rescue Final Entries

Many importers have heard that the Court of International Trade ordered CBP to refund IEEPA duties broadly — broadly enough, the assumption goes, that even entries already past the protest deadline will eventually be swept in automatically. That order is real, but it is not a safe substitute for protecting your own entries.

The automated refund process and the early court orders reach entries that are unliquidated or not yet final. Finally liquidated entries are a different and contested category. The government has taken the position that once an entry is finally liquidated, CBP has no authority to reliquidate it or issue a refund without a court order, and it is appealing the portions of the trade court’s order that would require automatic refunds to importers who never filed suit. That appeal — and the broader fight over whether non-litigants are entitled to relief at all — remains unresolved.

The practical consequence is straightforward. If you allow an entry to go final and you are not a named litigant, you are betting your refund on the outcome of an appeal you do not control. The conservative course is the opposite: keep your entries from going final in the first place, and preserve your standing to recover regardless of how the appeal turns out.

What Importers Should Do Now

The cost of reviewing your entries early is trivial. The cost of reviewing them late is the refund itself. We recommend the following, in order of urgency:

1. Pull the full entry list from your ACE account for the entire IEEPA period — roughly February 2025 through early 2026 — including entry numbers, entry dates, HTS classifications, IEEPA duties paid, country of origin, and liquidation dates. All importers are entitled to register for an ACE account.
2. Triage every entry by liquidation status into three buckets: unliquidated or liquidated within the last 80 days (CAPE-eligible); liquidated more than 80 days ago but still within 180 days (protest); and liquidated more than 180 days ago (final). Because the deadlines move forward daily, re-run this analysis regularly.
3. File CAPE Declarations promptly for unliquidated and within-80-day entries — before the 80-day clock, or any government appeal, can disrupt the automated track.
4. File protests (CBP Form 19) on entries past the 80-day CAPE window but still within 180 days of liquidation, to stop finality from attaching. This is the insurance policy for entries the automated process no longer reaches.
5. Identify entries that are already final and evaluate whether a Court of International Trade action under 28 U.S.C. § 1581(i) is necessary, given the government’s position that final entries require a court order.
6. Preserve your records — entry summaries (CF-7501), proof of payment, commercial invoices, bills of lading, and any post-entry activity. These are the foundation of any claim.
7. Don’t expect refunds on non-IEEPA duties. Section 232 and Section 301 tariffs were not affected by the Supreme Court’s decision, and the newer Section 122 surcharge is its own separate matter.

The Bottom Line

The Supreme Court handed importers a genuine and substantial recovery opportunity. But that opportunity is governed by customs deadlines that do not pause for litigation, executive action, or the rollout of a refund portal. For the earliest IEEPA entries, the protest window has already closed. For everything that came after, it is closing in sequence, every single day.

If your company paid IEEPA tariffs in 2025, the single most valuable thing you can do this week is determine the liquidation status of your entries and act on the ones nearest the line. Our trade practice can help you triage your entries, file protective protests before finality attaches, and assess whether litigation is warranted for entries that have already gone final.

How We Can Help

• We can get you access to your ACE account.
• We can review your entries and identify those eligible for refunds.
• We can file for refunds for entries that within the CAPE filing deadline.
• We can file protests for entries that missed the CAPE filing deadline.
• We can appeal protests that CBP denies in the Court of International Trade.

Contact us if you have any questions or would like additional information. We may be reached at info@liebermanpllc.com or 202.830.0300.

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This article is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice, nor does it create an attorney-client relationship. The IEEPA refund landscape is changing rapidly, and the proper course of action depends on the specific facts of each importer’s entries. Please consult qualified trade counsel regarding your particular situation.