You Still Have Options: Recovering IEEPA Tariff Refunds After the CAPE and Protest Deadlines Have Passed

If your company paid tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), you have likely heard by now that those tariffs are gone. What you may not have heard is that the door to getting IEEPA tariff refunds has not closed — even if you missed the government’s automated refund window or the deadline to protest your entries.

We are speaking with importers who assume they are out of luck because a customs broker told them the “CAPE timeline” or “IEEPA refund deadline” passed, or because their entries liquidated months ago without a protest on file. In many cases, that assumption is wrong. A separate and often overlooked path — litigation in the U.S. Court of International Trade — remains open, and for a meaningful number of importers it is now the only way to recover, but it is a real one. This article explains where things stand and what you can still do.

How We Got Here

On February 20, 2026, in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, No. 24-1287 (U.S. Feb. 20, 2026) — consolidated with Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, Inc. — the U.S. Supreme Court held that IEEPA does not give the President the power to impose tariffs. The Court reasoned that the authority to tax and to impose duties belongs to Congress under Article I of the Constitution, and that IEEPA’s grant of emergency powers — however broad — does not include the power to set tariffs. The decision affirmed an earlier ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and brought a definitive end to the IEEPA tariff program.

That ruling was a clear win on the law. But it left the hardest question unanswered: how do importers actually get their IEEPA tariff refunds? The Supreme Court did not lay out a refund mechanism, and the practical work of returning billions of dollars in collected duties has fallen to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and to the courts. The result has been a patchwork of processes with very different deadlines — and that is where many importers have been tripped up.

The CAPE Refund System — and Its Limits

To handle refunds at scale, CBP built a module within its Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) called CAPE (Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries). Since April 2026, CAPE has been calculating and issuing refunds of IEEPA duties, and for importers whose entries qualified, it has worked reasonably well.

The catch is scope. CAPE was designed to handle entries that were still open — that is, entries not yet “liquidated,” plus a narrow set of entries within roughly 80 days of liquidation. Liquidation is CBP’s formal finalization of an entry; once it happens and the clock runs out, the entry becomes administratively final. CAPE does not accomodate those finally liquidated entries.

In late May 2026, CBP went a step further and reversed an earlier suggestion that it might expand the system. It took the position that it lacks the legal authority to refund IEEPA duties on finally liquidated entries at all — absent a court judgment directing it to do so for a specific importer. For companies whose entries had already gone final, that announcement effectively closed the automatic administrative door.

CBP has since built out a “Phase 3” of the CAPE process, rolled out in the summer of 2026, that does handle finally liquidated entries. But it is not a self-service refund window for everyone. Consistent with a July 15, 2026 order from the Court of International Trade, Phase 3 processes refunds on finally liquidated entries pursuant to case-specific court orders — that is, for importers who went to court and obtained a judgment directing reliquidation. The court has signaled that substantially the same relief will follow across the thousands of individual refund cases already on file. The mechanism to reach a finally liquidated entry, in other words, now runs through the courthouse, not around it.

The Protest Deadline — And Why Missing It Is Not the End

The traditional way to challenge duties on a liquidated entry is an administrative protest under 19 U.S.C. § 1514, which must be filed within 180 days of liquidation. A timely protest keeps an entry alive and, once the tariffs were struck down, gives CBP a basis to reliquidate and refund.

Missing a protest window does not necessarily end your claim. It closes the administrative route through CBP. It does not close the judicial route for IEEPA tariff refunds.

The Path That Remains: Section 1581(i) Litigation at the Court of International Trade

The U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT) has exclusive jurisdiction over these disputes, and one of its jurisdictional grants — 28 U.S.C. § 1581(i), sometimes called the court’s “residual” jurisdiction — allows importers to sue directly to recover duties that were unlawfully collected. Critically, this route does not depend on having filed a protest, and it can reach entries that are already finally liquidated.

The reason this matters so much right now comes down to the statute of limitations. A Section 1581(i) claim generally must be filed within two years of the date the claim accrued — which, for these purposes, is tied to when the tariff was collected. In practical terms, an IEEPA duty collected in early February 2025 carries a filing deadline of approximately early February 2027; a duty collected in early 2026 runs to approximately early 2028. That two-year window is far more forgiving than the 180-day protest deadline, and it is why many importers who thought they had missed their chance actually still have one.

The courts have already shown they are prepared to order refunds through this route. In a series of 2026 orders, the Court of International Trade directed CBP to refund IEEPA duties to importers who had filed suit — including on finally liquidated entries, through court-ordered reliquidation processed under CAPE Phase 3 — regardless of whether those entries would otherwise have been out of reach administratively. The court has indicated that the same relief will be entered across the thousands of individual cases already pending. The key qualifier in every one of those orders is the same: the relief runs to importers who have filed cases. That is the single most important takeaway of this article: the remedy is available, but for finally liquidated entries it runs to those who go to court to claim it.

Why Waiting Is Risky

There is an active fight over whether refunds must reach everyone automatically or only importers who sued. The Court of International Trade issued a nationwide refund order, but the government has appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (No. 2026-1898), arguing that broad, universal relief is improper and that importers must file their own claims in the CIT to be entitled to refunds. That appeal remains pending. Thousands of companies — by mid-2026, several thousand individual cases — have already filed their own suits rather than wait for it to be resolved. A class-action mechanism intended to sweep in non-litigant importers has been proposed and was the subject of a certification motion argued in the summer of 2026, but as of this writing it has not been granted, its scope is undefined, and its outcome is far from guaranteed.

Betting your IEEPA tariff refunds on the government losing that appeal — or on a class action that may never be certified — is a gamble. Filing your own Section 1581(i) case removes that uncertainty: it secures your place in line, preserves your right to recover, and protects the statutory interest that accrues on your refund. And because the two-year clock runs entry-by-entry from the date of collection, every month of delay can permanently forfeit refunds on your oldest entries. For companies with significant 2025 collections, the earliest deadlines are approaching.

What You Should Do Now

Start by pulling together your import records for the period the IEEPA tariffs were in effect — your entry summaries (CBP Form 7501), the duties actually paid, and the liquidation dates for each entry. Those dates determine which recovery path applies and how much time you have. From there, the analysis is straightforward in concept even when the procedure is not: unliquidated entries and recently liquidated entries may still be recoverable through CBP’s existing channels, while finally liquidated and unprotested entries generally require a Section 1581(i) case at the Court of International Trade.

The amounts at stake are frequently large enough to more than justify the effort, and the litigation route is well-worn at this point — thousands of importers are already in it. What you cannot do is wait indefinitely. Once your two-year window closes on a given entry, that money is gone for good.

If your business paid IEEPA tariffs and you are not sure which of your entries are still recoverable, we can review your entry data, identify the deadlines that apply to your specific situation, and file to preserve your claims before they expire. Contact Lieberman PLLC to discuss your options.

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This article reflects the state of the law as of August 2026. IEEPA tariff refund litigation is evolving quickly, including a pending government appeal, and the rules governing eligibility and deadlines may change. Nothing here should be relied upon as legal advice or as a substitute for consultation with qualified counsel regarding your specific circumstances.