Trump Administration Appeals $166 Billion IEEPA Tariff Refund, Fighting Over Who Gets Paid Without Suing
Primary lensEntry posture review
Sub-topicClass relief
Evidence base12 records used
Use caseRefund posture
Current as of July 30, 2026
The IEEPA refund process has moved from system design to entry-by-entry execution. Importers with open or recently liquidated entries can use CBP's CAPE process. Plaintiffs in the roughly 3,700 IEEPA cases assigned to Judge Richard K. Eaton now also have a court-ordered route for entries that have been liquidated for more than 80 days. Importers that did not file suit still lack a confirmed path for those final entries unless a pending class action or broader court-wide relief reaches them.
That is the current dividing line. CAPE is processing refunds at scale, but the legal basis for a refund still depends on the entry's liquidation posture and on whether the importer is covered by a court order. A CAPE declaration is an administrative submission, not a substitute for analyzing finality, protest history, or litigation coverage.
For operators, the immediate work is concrete: reconcile each entry, confirm the importer of record and authorized filer, fix ACH information, isolate entries that CAPE rejects because of final liquidation, and decide with counsel whether the amount at risk justifies a Court of International Trade filing. Waiting for a single universal answer leaves the hardest entries exposed.
What changed after the first refund phase
The Supreme Court held on February 20 that IEEPA did not authorize the President to impose tariffs. The judgment resolved the validity of the duties but did not specify one refund procedure for every importer and every entry. Judge Eaton then directed CBP to liquidate or reliquidate affected entries without the IEEPA duties and temporarily suspended immediate compliance while CBP built an automated process.
CBP launched the Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries system, or CAPE, on April 20. The agency uses a filer-uploaded list of entry numbers to remove the IEEPA Chapter 99 provision, recalculate the entry, and issue a consolidated electronic refund with interest after validation and review. The public CBP instructions state that a declaration may contain up to 9,999 entries and that only the importer of record or the licensed customs broker that filed the entries may submit it.
By July, the process was no longer experimental. In a July 13 sworn declaration, CBP reported that, as of July 10:
229,609 CAPE declarations had been submitted and 161,792 passed file validation.
Accepted declarations covered 24.4 million entries that passed entry-specific validation.
16.74 million accepted entries had been liquidated or reliquidated without IEEPA duties.
Approximately $121.75 billion in potential and certified refunds had been accepted for CAPE processing.
Approximately $86.3 billion in duties and interest had been completed, certified, and sent to Treasury for disbursement.
9,837 refunds had not been transmitted to Treasury because the importer of record or its authorized designee had not supplied ACH information.
Those figures describe different stages. Accepted for processing is not the same as certified, sent to Treasury, or received in an importer account. The distinction matters when a company reconciles its receivable or tells a customer that a refund has been paid.
CBP also reported a June 29 expansion for entries flagged for reconciliation when no Entry Type 09 reconciliation entry had yet been filed. By July 10, 1.97 million such entries had been filed successfully in CAPE. This expansion did not eliminate the final-liquidation problem. CBP reported 4.77 million rejected entries, with the main reasons including liquidation outside the agency's voluntary reliquidation period, a missing IEEPA Chapter 99 number, or prior inclusion on another declaration.
The July 17 order gives filed plaintiffs a path for final entries
The most important legal change came in the order dated July 17 and filed July 20. Judge Eaton directed CBP to reliquidate plaintiffs' IEEPA entries that had been liquidated for more than 80 days. The order explains that entries liquidated for more than 90 days are beyond CBP's ordinary voluntary reliquidation authority under 19 U.S.C. 1501, while the 80-day threshold prevents an entry from becoming final during CAPE processing.
The procedure is narrower than a general invitation to upload every final entry. Plaintiffs' counsel must first submit the importer of record identification numbers requested by CBP. CBP will send instructions through counsel. After the information is accepted, the importer or its authorized filer may submit one or more CAPE declarations. Reliquidation occurs only after CBP accepts those declarations.
The July 15 order said this form of reliquidation order would be entered in each of the approximately 3,700 IEEPA cases assigned to the court. The July 17 order therefore supplies the legal authority the government said it needed to process finally liquidated entries for plaintiffs. It does not, by its terms, give every nonparty importer the same authority.
The order also keeps the cases stayed except for the actions it directs. Plaintiffs that need more relief may move under the court's rules. Plaintiffs that have received everything they sought are expected to dismiss. This structure makes the refund docket a portfolio of importer-specific recovery cases rather than a single final judgment that automatically closes every claim.
Non-filers still depend on class relief or broader authority
The remaining dispute is not whether the IEEPA duties were unlawful. It is who can obtain reliquidation after an entry has become final.
For a non-filing importer, the July 17 plaintiff order does not resolve that question. Judge Eaton's earlier language treated all affected importers as beneficiaries of the Supreme Court decision and directed broad relief. The government appealed that court-wide scope, arguing that relief should be limited to parties and invoking the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. CASA. The separate mandamus dispute over testimony ended in June, so it should no longer be confused with the merits appeal over refund scope.
The lead supervisory case also changed. The July 15 order recorded Euro-Notions Florida's intention to dismiss and identified Freestyle World, Inc. v. United States, Court No. 26-01088, as the successor case. A motion for class certification is pending there. Class certification could create a route for importers within a defined class, but it is not yet an order granting those importers relief.
Administrative Order 26-01 changed the filing mechanics on July 13. It removed the automatic stay for new IEEPA tariff cases filed after that date. Cases that were already stayed under the prior administrative order remain stayed until their assigned judge changes the stay. The order does not decide whether a new complaint is timely, whether the importer has jurisdiction, or whether the requested entries qualify for reliquidation. It does mean a new case is no longer automatically parked at filing under the old court-wide procedure.
The practical conclusion is cautious but clear. An importer with finally liquidated entries and no pending CIT case should not assume that another plaintiff's July 17 order covers it. It should identify the dollars and entries at issue, preserve the record, and obtain advice on filing and class coverage before treating the refund as recoverable.
Entry posture now matters more than a generic refund label
Every IEEPA-affected entry should be assigned to one current posture.
Open, suspended, extended, or under review
CBP states that these entries may be included in a CAPE declaration. The entry keeps its liquidation status until the underlying issue is resolved, and a validated refund is issued at liquidation. Operators should confirm that the IEEPA lines are present, that the importer and filer relationships match ACE, and that no separate compliance issue is holding the entry.
Liquidated within the CAPE window
CBP's Phase 1 guidance accepts entries liquidated within the preceding 80 days so the agency can complete voluntary reliquidation within the 90-day period in 19 U.S.C. 1501. These entries should be submitted promptly. A rejected file should be corrected based on the file-level or entry-level error, not simply resubmitted unchanged.
Flagged for reconciliation with no Entry Type 09 filed
The June 29 CAPE expansion accepts certain unliquidated or recently liquidated entries in this posture. Operators should confirm that the entry fits the published functionality before filing. The new capability does not convert a finally liquidated reconciliation entry into an ordinary Phase 1 entry.
Liquidated for more than 80 days
For plaintiffs covered by an Eaton reliquidation order, counsel and CBP provide the sequence that opens CAPE processing. For importers without a case, a CAPE rejection on finality is a legal-posture signal, not just a technical error. The next step may be litigation analysis or class analysis rather than another upload.
Open protest
The July 15 order states that additional CAPE functionality for entries with open protests was still under development. A protest and a CAPE declaration serve different functions. No operator should withdraw, amend, or rely on a protest without matching the statutory deadline, protest scope, liquidation event, and court strategy.
Four controls prevent avoidable delay
First, reconcile the filer identity before upload. CBP reported importer of record and filer mismatches as a leading file-validation failure. The ACE account, importer number, broker authorization, and three-digit filer prefix should agree with the entries in the declaration.
Second, fix electronic refund instructions. CBP sends refunds through ACH to the importer of record or a properly designated party. The July report's 9,837 payment holds show that an accepted refund can still stop before Treasury transmission. Confirm the ACE refund profile and any CBP Form 4811 designation before treating the payment path as complete.
Third, separate principal, interest, and offsets. CAPE recalculates the entire entry. Other duties, taxes, fees, AD/CVD deposits, and Section 232 amounts remain collectible. CBP may also divert a refund against legally fixed and undisputed federal debt. The amount of IEEPA duty on the original entry is therefore not necessarily the amount that reaches the bank account.
Fourth, preserve a row-level evidence file. Keep the entry summary, IEEPA Chapter 99 lines, liquidation and reliquidation dates, CAPE declaration number, validation messages, refund calculation, ACH destination, Treasury status, protest record, and any court case number together. If the importer passed the duty to a customer, preserve the contract and refund-entitlement terms as a separate commercial issue.
Section 122 remains a separate refund track
The temporary 10 percent surcharge imposed under Section 122 took effect on February 24 and, by Proclamation 11012, continued through 12:01 a.m. Eastern time on July 24 unless Congress extended it or the President ended it earlier. The proclamation did not make Section 122 duties part of the IEEPA CAPE process.
The Court of International Trade held the surcharge unlawful in State of Oregon and Burlap and Barrel, but limited relief to the plaintiffs before it. The appeal and any resulting refund claims remain separate from the IEEPA process. An IEEPA CAPE declaration does not preserve a Section 122 protest or court claim.
Operators should therefore keep the two duty families in separate ledgers. An entry may require an IEEPA refund workflow, a Section 122 protest or litigation workflow, and retention of unrelated duties on the same entry. Combining them into one expected-refund number obscures both legal coverage and reconciliation.
The operational answer
The refund mechanism now works for a large share of entries, but it does not erase finality or party status. CAPE has demonstrated scale. The July 17 orders add a specific path for finally liquidated entries belonging to plaintiffs. The pending class request and the government's appeal leave non-filers with final entries outside a confirmed remedy.
The best current decision rule is entry-specific:
Use CAPE now for eligible open and recently liquidated entries.
Use the June 29 functionality for eligible reconciliation-flagged entries.
For a covered plaintiff, follow counsel's importer-number submission and the court-ordered CAPE procedure for entries liquidated more than 80 days.
For a non-filer with final entries, quantify the exposure and decide on litigation or class reliance with counsel.
Treat Section 122, protests, customer entitlements, and refund offsets as separate workstreams.
The $166 billion headline describes the scale of the unwinding. It does not describe any one importer's recoverable amount. That answer now sits in the entry ledger, the CAPE validation record, and the scope of the court order that applies to the importer.
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