CAPE Phase 3 Opens October 6: Why Part of Your IEEPA Refund Is Still Missing and How to Get It

This article is general information, not legal advice. Refund eligibility depends on the facts of each entry. Consult a qualified attorney before relying on any deadline described here.

In short: CAPE Phase 3 opens October 6, 2026, but it pays only importers who have already filed at the Court of International Trade and hold a court order. If you filed CAPE on your own, the entries it skipped are still unpaid, and the only route CBP recognizes for them is a complaint filed by an attorney.

Key facts as of September 29, 2026

• CBP told the court on September 15 that CAPE Phase 3 deploys October 6 for plaintiffs with a reliquidation order whose importer number reached CBP by July 30 (Lord declaration, ECF 50).
• Importers who have not filed a complaint are not eligible for Phase 3. The government's position is that refunds on finally liquidated entries require a complaint at the CIT (July 28 filing, ECF 18).
• In our client files the stranded share ranged from zero to more than half of the refund, averaging 12 to 14 percent, and close to 20 percent for importers only now reviewing older entries.
• The conservative filing deadline for the earliest entries is February 2027.

If you filed for your IEEPA tariff refund through CAPE this spring and the money arrived, you probably think you are done. For most importers, that is not true. In the client files we have run this year, the share of an importer's refund sitting on entries CAPE was not allowed to pay ranged from nothing to more than half, and for an importer only now looking at its older entries it runs close to 20 percent. CBP has no plan to send that money unless a court tells it to. This article explains which entries those are, why the portal skipped them, what CAPE Phase 3 on October 6 does and does not change, and what a self-filer has to do to collect the rest.

What CAPE paid you and what it skipped

CAPE is the CBP refund portal built after the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) on February 20, 2026. Since Phase 1 opened on April 20, it has paid on two kinds of entries: entries CBP had not yet liquidated, and entries it had liquidated less than 80 days before you filed (CBP CAPE notice).

Liquidation is the customs word for closing an entry. About a year after your goods arrive, CBP finalizes the duties on that entry. Once an entry has been liquidated for more than 90 days, CBP loses its own power to reopen it under 19 U.S.C. 1501. That 90 day line is what the court and CBP mean by "finally liquidated." CBP set the CAPE cutoff at 80 days so its processing would finish inside the window.

Everything older was skipped. If you have been importing since early 2025, that is a year or more of entries, and every one of them was excluded.

How much is sitting there

Across the five client files we have run this year, the share of IEEPA duty on entries CAPE could not pay ranged from zero to more than half. The two clients who came to us in the spring, when almost everything was still unliquidated, had little or nothing stranded. The importer we analyzed in August had 57 percent of its IEEPA duty on entries CAPE cannot pay. Averaged across all five, the stranded share is 12 to 14 percent. The one importer we have scoped this month, a company that has not yet filed anything, is at roughly 20 percent.

CBP's own estimate, given to the Court of International Trade (CIT) in June, put finally liquidated entries at roughly $11.4 billion, or 6.9 percent of all IEEPA duties collected (Supply Chain Dive). That figure was measured in June. Entries have kept liquidating every day since, so the national number is larger now.

If 20 percent of your IEEPA duty is stranded and you paid a million dollars, that is 200 thousand dollars. Interest runs on top from the day the duty was paid. Our clients' refunds so far have carried roughly 4 to 6.5 percent interest for about a year of accrual. Stranded entries will have accrued closer to two years by the time they pay, so a rough estimate is 10 percent or more of principal. The rate is set quarterly and we cannot promise a figure.

Why the portal cannot pay these entries

This is the government's stated legal position, not a CAPE bug.

In a July 28 filing at the CIT, the government's lawyers wrote that refunds on finally liquidated entries are available "as long as the importer files a complaint in this Court." CBP's Executive Assistant Commissioner for its Office of Trade said in a June sworn declaration that CBP does not intend to refund IEEPA duties on entries of non-plaintiffs, meaning importers that have not filed their own case, where the entry liquidated beyond the 80 day window.

The reasoning is finality. Under 19 U.S.C. 1514, if the importer does not protest a liquidation within 180 days, that liquidation is final and conclusive on everyone, including CBP. A protest is the standard paper challenge to a liquidation. Under 19 U.S.C. 1501, CBP's own window to reliquidate, meaning to redo the liquidation and refund the difference, closes at 90 days. Past those windows, the government argues, CBP cannot reliquidate without a court order, and reliquidation is how CAPE pays. Judge Eaton's July 17 order in AGS Company Automotive Solutions, and matching orders reported in the other IEEPA cases, supply that authority, but only for the plaintiffs in each case.

What CAPE Phase 3 on October 6 does and does not do

On September 15, CBP told the court in a sworn declaration that it will deploy CAPE Phase 3 on October 6, 2026. Phase 3 covers finally liquidated entries, but only for plaintiffs whose entries are already subject to a court reliquidation order. Plaintiffs who submitted a valid importer of record number to CBP by July 30 can file Phase 3 declarations on October 6. CBP said it will provide additional instructions to plaintiffs who provided their number after July 30, with no date attached.

So October 6 is when plaintiffs who got their importer number to CBP by July 30 can start filing Phase 3 declarations. Refunds follow after CBP processes them. It is not a new door for importers who have not filed. Trade counsel at Ward and Smith put it plainly in a September 18 alert: importers whose entries are not covered by court ordered relief do not become eligible for Phase 3 merely because the system opens.

Two things about the date itself. CBP originally expected Phase 3 in late July, then late August. On August 25 it told the court it had delayed deployment to build validations that make sure nothing but IEEPA duty gets touched on a finally liquidated entry. October 6 is the third target, and the date has slipped twice already.

As of September 29 there is no CSMS bulletin, the notice system CBP uses to tell the trade about procedure changes, and no cbp.gov page announcing Phase 3 or the October 6 date. The date exists in the court record and in trade press quoting it.

The pending appeal and the class actions

The government has appealed the court's April 17 universal orders, the ones that would have required CBP to reliquidate everyone's entries whether or not they sued. That appeal is at the Federal Circuit under docket 26-1895, and as of this writing no argument has been scheduled through December. The government has not appealed the July plaintiff-specific orders and has said it intends to comply with them.

Two motions to certify a class of all importers are pending at the CIT, one in V.O.S. Selections and one in Freestyle World, both argued in August. If a class were certified, non-plaintiffs might eventually get relief without filing their own case. Nobody should plan around that. The government has opposed class treatment, no ruling has issued, and the only path that exists today is the one the government described: file a complaint.

The deadline

A complaint at the CIT under 28 U.S.C. 1581(i), the provision that lets importers sue over customs actions the protest process does not cover, must be filed within two years of when the claim accrued under 28 U.S.C. 2636(i). Courts have not settled when an IEEPA refund claim accrued. The most conservative reading starts the clock at the date the duty was paid, which puts the earliest entries, from February 2025, at risk in February 2027. Do not assume a customs protest stopped that clock. At least one trade firm that has looked at the question says a protective protest should not be relied on to toll a separate 1581(i) action.

What a self-filer should do now

Pull your liquidation dates. Your broker can run an ACE report showing every entry, its liquidation date, and its IEEPA duty in minutes. Any entry liquidated more than 80 days before your CAPE filing was not paid and, under CBP's current position, will not be paid unless a court orders it.

Total the IEEPA duty on those entries. That is your stranded principal. Add a rough 10 percent or more for interest.

Do not withdraw any protest you have on file. CAPE does not accept entries under an open protest, and nobody has said how Phase 3 will treat them. Keep the protest in place until an attorney tells you otherwise.

Have an attorney file a complaint at the CIT. Under the court's rules a company cannot file without counsel, and a customs broker cannot file at all. The complaint is short. The court has thousands of these cases and has been handling them under a common administrative order rather than case by case trials. Filing is the first step toward the group Phase 3 serves. Your case still needs a reliquidation order, your importer number has to be submitted to CBP, and CBP has not yet said when importers who submitted after July 30 will be able to file Phase 3 declarations.

Do it before February. The safe assumption is that the earliest entries expire then.

What we do

Tariff Refund Solutions handles the complaint, the importer number submission to CBP, and the Phase 3 declaration once your entries are under a court order. We work on contingency. There is no fee up front, and we are paid only on what we recover for you.

If you filed CAPE yourself and want to know what your stranded number is, send us your ACE entry report and we will tell you what it is.

Questions importers are asking