Two months after the Supreme Court struck down the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (“IEEPA”) tariffs in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, the refund process has finally opened. On April 20, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) activated the Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries portal (“CAPE”), giving more than 330,000 importers across 53 million entries their first real mechanism to recover a share of $166 billion in duties collected under now-invalidated authority. For many companies, that means a meaningful check. Getting it requires acting promptly and getting the technical details right.
What CAPE Actually Does
CAPE lives inside CBP’s existing Automated Commercial Environment (“ACE”) Secure Data Portal. Importers (or their licensed customs brokers) upload a comma-separated values file (“CSV”), a “CAPE Declaration”, listing the entry numbers for which they are seeking refunds. ACE validates the declaration, strips the IEEPA duty lines from the affected entry summaries and recalculates the duties owed. CBP then liquidates or reliquidates the entries and consolidates the refunds by importer of record, issuing payment electronically to a designated U.S. bank account. The stated processing window, once a declaration is accepted, is 60 to 90 days. Refunds include statutory interest.
That is the clean scenario. Early reports suggest the launch is functioning, but with submission delays and portal congestion as initial filings surge, and with CBP flagging “Unable to calculate duty” errors for entries where the importer’s data does not precisely match the original entry summary at the line level. CAPE will not reconcile those discrepancies automatically; rather, entries with classification errors or data inconsistencies are being routed for manual review, which slows the clock considerably. The practical message: a clean, well-prepared filing moves faster than a rushed one.
Phase 1 Scope — and Its Limits
Phase 1 covers certain unliquidated entries and entries within 80 days of liquidation, which CBP estimates captures roughly 63% of all IEEPA-affected imports. Critically, for this subset of entries, importers do not need a court order to use CAPE, the portal is open to any eligible importer of record or authorized broker.
However, Phase 1 does not cover fully liquidated entries (i.e., those where the 180-day protest window has expired), entries with drawback or reconciliation flags, and entries where a surety paid the duty. CBP has confirmed these will be addressed in later phases but has not committed to a timeline. That category, finally liquidated entries representing the remaining 37%, is precisely where the legal risk is greatest, both because the refund path is less certain and because those entries are most vulnerable to the government’s anticipated appeal arguments.
The Setup Steps To Receive Refunds
Before a CAPE Declaration can be filed, two ACE enrollment steps must be complete, and they are separate from each other:
An importer must have an active “Importer” sub-account in ACE. Holding an importer of record (“IOR”) number does not create this automatically, it requires a separate application linking the IOR number to an ACE profile. Second, the importer must be enrolled specifically in Automated Clearing House Refund (“ACH”), the mechanism through which CBP issues electronic payments. Completing both steps now, before filing, avoids any delay or bottleneck. Once a CAPE Declaration is accepted, it cannot be amended, so entries omitted from the first filing require a new declaration. Each entry can only appear on one accepted declaration.
Additionally, CBP will automatically offset any outstanding debts against the refund balance before disbursement, and each CAPE Declaration is limited to 9,999 entries, so importers with larger portfolios will need to file in batches.
The Appeal Overhang
None of this unfolds in a vacuum. The government has until approximately June 7, 2026 to appeal Judge Eaton’s refund order to the Federal Circuit, and practitioners widely expect it to do so once CAPE is operational and the Court of International Trade (“CIT”) lifts its current suspension of the underlying order. The anticipated theory draws on the Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling in Trump v. CASA, Inc., which curtailed the availability of nationwide injunctions. The government is expected to argue that the CIT, like a federal district court, cannot issue relief that extends to all importers, regardless of whether they filed suit. Judge Eaton’s order concluded that the CIT’s unique statutory grant of nationwide jurisdiction distinguishes it from the courts CASA addressed, but that question is genuinely open, and no appellate court has resolved it.
A second likely argument targets finally liquidated entries specifically, on the theory that statutory finality provisions under Title 19 of the United States Code § 1514 bar the government from reopening them. That argument, if it prevailed, would permanently eliminate refund rights for a material portion of importers.
What This Means for Importers Right Now
The practical result is that the safest position for any importer with significant exposure is to act on both tracks simultaneously: complete enrollment and submit a CAPE Declaration for Phase 1 entries, while also evaluating whether a protective CIT filing or administrative protest makes sense to preserve rights on entries outside Phase 1 or at risk of falling outside the 80-day window. Entries that have already passed the 180-day protest window may be permanently outside the refund universe if the government prevails on appeal.
An importer filing a clean CAPE Declaration in late April can realistically expect funds sometime between mid-July and mid-August 2026, assuming CBP holds to its 60-to-90-day processing estimate, a timeline that does not account for any Federal Circuit stay.
What Consumers Should Expect
The CAPE refund mechanism operates exclusively at the importer-of-record level. Refunds are disbursed directly to the importing entity through CBP’s ACH system, there is no parallel consumer filing process and no automatic downstream rebate program. As CBP develops later phases of the program to address the remaining 37% of IEEPA-affected entries, additional guidance may follow. Individual consumers seeking guidance regarding specific purchases should consult with qualified counsel.
For more background on how the refund process developed from the Supreme Court’s February ruling through the CIT’s initial orders and the early development of CAPE, see our March 2026 update. To discuss further, contact KJK attorney Josie Forney (JFF@kjk.com).