U.S. Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) has set October 6, 2026, for the launch of Phase 3 of its IEEPA tariff refund system.
Phase 3 will allow plaintiffs covered by Court of International Trade (“CIT”) reliquidation orders to submit certain older entries through CBP’s Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries system, or “CAPE.” For those entries, Phase 3 is an implementation mechanism rather than the source of CBP’s authority to reliquidate—the CIT orders authorize CBP to reopen the covered entries, and CAPE provides the system for processing the resulting reliquidation and refund. Importers whose entries are not covered by comparable court-ordered relief do not become eligible for Phase 3 merely because the system opens on October 6, 2026.
The launch follows the Supreme Court’s decision in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, which held that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (“IEEPA”), 50 U.S.C. § 1702, did not authorize the President to impose the challenged tariffs. The decision settled the legality of the IEEPA tariffs, but did not itself establish a universal administrative mechanism for refunding duties already collected or prescribe how every affected customs entry would be corrected once those duties had been assessed, paid, and, in many cases, liquidated.
What happens next depends on the rules governing liquidation, reliquidation, protests, and CIT review. Once an entry is liquidated, CBP’s ability to change the assessment becomes more limited. Importers retain separate rights to protest qualifying Customs decisions, and the CIT may provide relief when the administrative statutes do not. Those rules account for CAPE’s original 80-day cutoff, the CIT’s plaintiff-specific reliquidation orders for older entries, the uncertain role of protests in preserving pure IEEPA claims, and the significance of the pending appeal and class motions.
How the Customs Entry Process Allocates Authority
The IEEPA refund issues are easier to follow once the underlying customs process is clear. An imported shipment enters the United States through an entry filed by the importer of record. Under 19 U.S.C. § 1484, the importer of record supplies the information CBP needs to assess the merchandise, including its declared value, classification, and rate of duty. Duties paid at that stage generally are estimated duties, not necessarily CBP’s final determination of what the importer owes.
CBP makes that final determination through liquidation. Under 19 U.S.C. § 1500, CBP fixes the final appraisement, classification, rate of duty, and amount of duty due, and then liquidates the entry. CBP’s regulations define liquidation as the “final computation or ascertainment of duties” on the entry. 19 C.F.R. § 159.1.
That distinction between entry and liquidation matters in the IEEPA refund cases. Before liquidation, CBP has not yet made its final duty computation. If an entry remains unliquidated, CBP can liquidate it without the IEEPA duties once the legal basis for those duties has disappeared. However, once CBP liquidates the entry, the final duty assessment cannot be changed simply through ordinary entry processing. Any later correction must rest on a specific statutory or judicial basis—for example, CBP’s limited voluntary-reliquidation authority under 19 U.S.C. § 1501, a valid protest under §§ 1514 and 1515, or a court order directing reliquidation.
CBP has a limited means of correcting a completed liquidation on its own. Under 19 U.S.C. § 1501, the agency may reliquidate an entry—that is, issue a new liquidation revising the completed duty assessment—“in any respect” within 90 days after the original liquidation. Once that period expires, CBP takes the position that § 1501 no longer allows it to reopen the entry voluntarily simply because the original assessment later proves legally incorrect.
Importers have a separate administrative remedy for certain Customs decisions. Under 19 U.S.C. §§ 1514 and 1515, an importer may protest specified decisions made by CBP, and the agency must review a valid protest. If CBP denies the protest, the importer may seek review in the Court of International Trade under 28 U.S.C. § 1581(a). That route, however, depends on the existence of a protestable decision of Customs. It does not necessarily reach a legal requirement that CBP merely implemented and had no authority to disregard.
When the claim does not fit the ordinary protest route, the Court of International Trade may have jurisdiction under another provision of 28 U.S.C. § 1581. Section 1581(i), for example, supplies residual jurisdiction over specified trade-related claims that do not fall within the statute’s other jurisdictional grants. Once a claim is properly before the court, 28 U.S.C. § 2643 authorizes the CIT to enter money judgments and other appropriate relief, including injunctions and orders requiring further administrative action.
CAPE operates within these existing sources of authority. It does not create a new one. It is the administrative functionality CBP developed within ACE to consolidate and process IEEPA refunds. CAPE can therefore process an entry when CBP already has authority to liquidate or reliquidate it, or when a court order directs CBP to do so. The system itself does not supply the legal basis for reopening a completed liquidation.
Seen in that sequence, the current refund structure follows from the procedural posture of the entry. CBP can correct unliquidated and recently liquidated entries under its existing administrative authority. Once that authority expires, the government maintains that CBP needs another legal basis, such as a court order, to reopen the liquidation. A protest may provide a separate route only if the challenged matter was actually a decision Customs had authority to make. Those distinctions explain both CAPE’s original limits and the need for Phase 3.
Why Phase 1 Stops at 80 Days and What Phase 3 Changes
CAPE itself grew out of the CIT’s post-Learning Resources supervision of the refund process. In Atmus Filtration, Inc. v. United States, the court directed CBP on March 4 to liquidate covered unliquidated entries and reliquidate covered entries for which liquidation was not final without IEEPA duties. Two days later, the court suspended immediate compliance to allow CBP time to develop an automated refund mechanism and required periodic status reports. After Atmus was voluntarily dismissed in April, Euro-Notions Florida, Inc. v. United States replaced it as the test case for the refund process, and CBP continued developing CAPE under the court’s supervision. See 91 Fed. Reg. 42207, 42208 (July 8, 2026).
CAPE’s original 80-day cutoff was designed around CBP’s 90-day voluntary-reliquidation authority under 19 U.S.C. § 1501. Phase 1 generally accepts unliquidated entries and entries liquidated within the preceding 80 days. CBP explained to the CIT that the ten-day margin is necessary to validate the CAPE declaration, remove the IEEPA tariff provisions, review the revised entry, and complete reliquidation before § 1501 expires on day 90. CBP therefore limited Phase 1 to entries no more than 80 days past liquidation “to ensure that processing is complete and the entries are reliquidated by the 90th day.” March 31, 2026 CBP declaration ¶ 15(c).
The 80-day cutoff is thus an administrative processing limit, not the expiration of CBP’s statutory authority. On day 81, an entry may no longer fit within Phase 1 because CBP cannot assure completion before the statutory deadline, even though § 1501 continues to permit voluntary reliquidation until day 90. Once the 90-day period expires, however, CBP takes the position that it can no longer reopen the liquidation on its own authority.
Phase 2 expanded CAPE to certain reconciliation-flagged entries, but it did not change that basic timing problem. Entries more than 80 days past liquidation remained outside the ordinary CAPE process, and entries more than 90 days past liquidation were, in the government’s view, beyond CBP’s voluntary-reliquidation authority altogether.
Beginning in mid-July 2026, Judge Richard K. Eaton began entering plaintiff-specific reliquidation orders in individual IEEPA refund cases, rather than a single order covering all importers. The CIT entered such an order in Princess Awesome, LLC v. U.S. Customs & Border Protection on July 15, followed by materially similar orders in Astronics Corp. v. U.S. Customs & Border Protection and AGS Company Automotive Solutions v. U.S. Customs & Border Protection on July 17, and Federal Express Corp. v. United States on July 21. The court indicated that substantially the same relief would be entered in the approximately 3,700 IEEPA refund cases then pending before it.
The orders direct CBP to reliquidate, “without regard to IEEPA duties,” any qualifying plaintiff entries that have been liquidated for more than 80 days and on which the plaintiff made estimated IEEPA duty deposits. They also impose two prerequisites to implementation—(1) plaintiff’s counsel must provide CBP with the plaintiff’s importer-of-record identification number or numbers, and (2) CBP must accept the plaintiff’s CAPE declaration before reliquidation occurs.
CBP’s September 15, 2026 update further states that plaintiffs who provided a valid importer-of-record number by July 30, 2026, may begin filing Phase 3 declarations on October 6. CBP will provide additional instructions for plaintiffs who provided their importer number after July 30.
The orders begin with entries more than 80 days past liquidation because those entries are already outside Phase 1’s normal processing window, even though CBP’s § 1501 authority does not expire until day 90. An entry on day 81 may still technically be within the statutory reliquidation period, but CBP has said it can no longer guarantee completion of CAPE processing before the 90-day deadline. The plaintiff-specific order therefore gives CBP authority to process the entry without depending on the remaining days in § 1501’s window and continues to supply that authority after day 90, when the government maintains CBP can no longer reliquidate voluntarily.
For importers with older liquidated entries that did not obtain their own CIT reliquidation orders, Phase 3 does not presently supply a refund route merely because it opens on October 6, 2026. Their position instead turns on the broader orders now on appeal, the pending class motions, and, if those avenues do not supply relief, the availability and timeliness of an individual § 1581(i) action.
Why the 180-Day Protest Period Does Not Solve the IEEPA Refund Problem
The expiration of CBP’s 90-day voluntary-reliquidation authority does not necessarily mean that every issue on the entry is beyond administrative review. 19 U.S.C. § 1514 generally gives an importer 180 days after liquidation or reliquidation to protest specified decisions of Customs, including decisions concerning classification, value, the rate and amount of duties, and liquidation itself. If CBP denies a valid protest, the importer may seek review in the CIT under 28 U.S.C. § 1581(a).
That 180-day period, however, is not a general extension of CBP’s 90-day authority under § 1501. The two statutes address different things. Section 1501 gives CBP itself a limited period to reopen a liquidation voluntarily, while section 1514 gives the importer a means to challenge specified decisions that Customs actually made. A timely protest can therefore remain available after day 90 for a protestable Customs issue without restoring CBP’s general power to reliquidate the entry on its own initiative.
For the IEEPA duties, the underlying legal challenge was directed to the President’s authority to impose the tariffs, not to a discretionary determination made by CBP. In Thomson Consumer Electronics, Inc. v. United States, the Federal Circuit held that an importer did not have to protest Customs’ collection of the Harbor Maintenance Tax in order to challenge the tax’s constitutionality. Customs merely collected the assessment required by statute and had no authority to decide whether the statute was constitutional. Requiring a protest on that issue therefore would have been futile.
The CIT applied the same principle to the IEEPA tariffs in AGS Company Automotive Solutions v. U.S. Customs & Border Protection. While the presidential tariff orders remained in force, the court concluded that CBP had no authority to disregard them or determine whether the President lawfully issued them. As to that question, Customs was implementing the President’s directive rather than making an independent legal determination. The court therefore treated the challenge as one arising under the CIT’s residual jurisdiction in § 1581(i), not through a protest followed by § 1581(a) review.
That does not mean liquidation is never protestable, or that an entry carrying IEEPA duties cannot contain other protestable issues. Section 1514(a) expressly covers Customs decisions concerning classification, value, the rate and amount of duties, and liquidation or reliquidation. If CBP actually made the disputed determination, the importer may have to preserve it through a timely protest.
The Federal Circuit’s decision in ARP Materials, Inc. v. United States illustrates that point. The importers there sought refunds after USTR retroactively excluded their products from Section 301 tariffs, but the relevant entries had been liquidated under classifications made by Customs. The Federal Circuit held that those classifications were protestable decisions under § 1514. Because the importers could have obtained an adequate remedy through timely protests, they could not allow that route to expire and then invoke § 1581(i) instead.
An IEEPA entry can therefore present two different kinds of legal issues at once. The importer’s challenge to the President’s authority to impose the IEEPA tariff may fall outside the ordinary protest mechanism, while a separate classification, valuation, origin, or other determination made by CBP on the same entry remains subject to the 180-day protest deadline.
That is why the existence of a 180-day protest period does not answer the Phase 3 problem. The question is not simply whether 180 days have elapsed since liquidation, but whether the particular issue the importer seeks to challenge is a decision Customs had authority to make.
The Role of IEEPA-Only Protests
The harder practical question is whether an importer nevertheless gains anything by filing a protest directed solely to the IEEPA duties. As discussed above, AGS treated the legality of the presidential tariff orders as outside CBP’s decision-making authority while those orders remained in force. At the same time, the CIT later cautioned importers to remain aware of their 19 U.S.C. § 1514 remedies while the refund process for older entries was still developing. In practice, some IEEPA-only protests have therefore been treated as protective—a means of avoiding an unnecessary forfeiture argument while the courts and CBP determine the proper refund mechanism—rather than as an established administrative route to the refund itself.
CBP’s CAPE rules also show that an IEEPA-only protest is not the mechanism CBP is using to issue the refund. Under its current Phase 1 rules, CBP will not accept an entry summary associated with an open or suspended protest on a CAPE declaration. But CBP expressly allows an importer that filed a protest solely for IEEPA refund purposes to withdraw that protest, if the entry is otherwise eligible and within 80 days of liquidation, and then submit the entry through CAPE. CBP CSMS #68340863 That procedure treats CAPE—not adjudication of the protest—as the mechanism for actually processing the IEEPA refund.
The CAPE restriction should not be confused with a limitation on CBP’s underlying statutory authority. Section 1501 expressly provides that CBP may voluntarily reliquidate an entry within its 90-day period “notwithstanding the filing of a protest.” CBP’s implementing regulation says the same thing. 19 C.F.R. § 173.3(a). An open protest therefore does not legally deprive CBP of § 1501 authority while that authority remains available. CAPE’s current refusal to process protested entries is a rule of the refund system, not a rule Congress imposed in § 1501.
That distinction becomes more important once the 90-day period has expired. At that point, the importer cannot rely on § 1501 to supply CBP with voluntary-reliquidation authority. Nor has CBP treated an IEEPA-only protest as an independent substitute for the plaintiff-specific court orders being implemented through Phase 3. Under the government’s current position, the established route for an older entry is a § 1581(i) action, a court order directing reliquidation, and then CAPE processing through Phase 3.
The status of an IEEPA-only protest therefore sits between two clearer rules. It may preserve an argument while the procedural law continues to develop, but current authority does not establish that filing such a protest is either required to preserve the pure IEEPA claim or sufficient to obtain the refund on an older entry.
If the protest also challenges classification, valuation, origin, or another determination made by CBP, withdrawing it simply to clear the entry for CAPE could affect rights unrelated to the IEEPA refund. Those issues remain subject to the ordinary protest regime even if the challenge to the President’s IEEPA authority does not.
CBP has also indicated that it is continuing to develop CAPE functionality for categories not accepted in the initial deployment, including entries associated with open protests. Until CBP specifies how Phase 3 will treat those entries, the existence of a protest and eligibility for court-ordered CAPE processing should be analyzed separately rather than assuming that one automatically resolves the other. More broadly, a CAPE submission is a processing mechanism and should not be treated as independently preserving a protest right or judicial filing deadline. CAPE eligibility and any separate deadline under § 1514 or § 2636 therefore must be analyzed independently.
The Scope of Reliquidation
The source of CBP’s authority also determines how broadly it may revise an entry once the entry is reopened.
When CBP acts within the 90-day period provided by 19 U.S.C. § 1501, Congress permits the agency to reliquidate the entry “in any respect.” CBP’s regulations likewise permit a voluntary reliquidation to correct classification, appraisement, legal errors, and other elements that entered into the original liquidation. A timely voluntary reliquidation therefore is not necessarily limited to removing the IEEPA duties. If CBP identifies another proper adjustment while it still has § 1501 authority, that adjustment may affect the resulting liquidation as well.
For Phase 3 entries, CBP is acting pursuant to the CIT’s plaintiff-specific orders rather than its ordinary § 1501 authority. Those orders direct CBP to reliquidate the covered entries “without regard to IEEPA duties” and define the relief the agency is implementing. They do not generally authorize CBP to revisit unrelated aspects of the entry, and they expressly reserve separate disputes concerning duty-free de minimis treatment under 19 U.S.C. § 1321.
That limitation affected the design of Phase 3 itself. CBP advised the court that it needed additional validations for older, court-ordered entries so that CAPE could remove the IEEPA duties without making unrelated adjustments outside the scope of the court-ordered relief. Phase 3 therefore uses the same CAPE infrastructure as the earlier phases, but CBP is processing those entries pursuant to the terms of the applicable CIT order.
Under 19 U.S.C. § 1514(d), reliquidation does not reopen an entry for protest of an issue that was not involved in that reliquidation. An importer therefore cannot use a Phase 3 reliquidation of the IEEPA duties to revive an expired challenge to an unrelated classification, valuation, origin, or other Customs determination.
A voluntary reliquidation under § 1501 can reach any proper issue within CBP’s statutory authority during the 90-day period, while a Phase 3 reliquidation is limited by the CIT order CBP is implementing. Section 1514(d), in turn, prevents that later reliquidation from creating a new protest opportunity for unrelated issues.
The Appeal Over the CIT’s Broader Refund Orders
The plaintiff-specific Phase 3 orders are not the only refund orders now in play. Following the broader remedial orders that developed through the Atmus and Euro-Notions proceedings, the CIT entered another broader order on April 17, 2026, in V.O.S. Selections directing CBP to liquidate all unliquidated entries subject to IEEPA duties without those duties and to reliquidate all liquidated entries, including entries for which liquidation was already final, on the same basis. The order was not limited to the named plaintiffs.
That broader order reaches a group the plaintiff-specific July orders do not necessarily cover: importers with older liquidated entries who have not filed their own CIT actions. The government appealed the April 17 order, along with materially similar orders entered in related cases, and the Federal Circuit consolidated four appeals under V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. Trump, No. 26-1895. The court later dismissed the Euro-Notions appeal, No. 26-1898, on the government’s unopposed motion. The remaining consolidated appeals continue.
The government has not appealed the plaintiff-specific reliquidation orders discussed above, and states in its August 10 opening brief that it intends to comply with them. The appeal is directed instead to the CIT’s broader orders extending refund relief to importers that are not parties to those cases.
The government advances three principal grounds for vacating the broader orders. First, relying on Trump v. CASA, Inc., it argues that the CIT lacks equitable authority to issue universal injunctions benefiting nonparties. Second, it argues that the court departed from the party-presentation principle by granting relief that no plaintiff had requested on that scale and without adversarial briefing directed to that remedy. Third, it argues that the CIT did not apply the traditional requirements for injunctive relief, including irreparable harm.
The importer parties respond that the CIT’s remedial authority is not identical to that of an ordinary district court. They rely in part on 28 U.S.C. § 2643, which authorizes the CIT to enter money judgments and “order any other form of relief that is appropriate,” as well as the court’s nationwide trade jurisdiction and the constitutional requirement that duties be uniform. The Federal Circuit had already required the CIT to reconsider the scope of its original injunction under CASA in its August 29, 2025 decision, but it did not finally resolve every theory advanced in support of broader relief.
The basis for the Federal Circuit’s ruling will determine how much the appeal actually settles. If the court holds that the CIT cannot extend this form of equitable relief to nonparties, the April 17 orders would no longer provide a refund route for importers who never brought their own actions. If the court instead vacates because the CIT failed to make the necessary equitable findings or because the remedy was not properly presented for decision, other forms of broader relief may remain available.
Even if the Federal Circuit vacates the April 17 orders, that ruling would not necessarily resolve the merits or timeliness of an individual claim brought by an importer that was never a party to those orders. Nor would it decide the separate class-certification motions now pending before the CIT, which ask whether absent importers may obtain relief through Rule 23 rather than through an injunction extending directly to nonparties.
The Pending Class Motions
The class-certification motions offer another possible route for importers that have not obtained their own reliquidation orders. Unlike the April 17 orders now on appeal, class relief would proceed through Rule 23, which supplies a formal mechanism for adjudicating claims on behalf of defined absent parties rather than simply extending an injunction beyond the plaintiffs before the court.
In V.O.S. Selections, the plaintiffs moved on June 4 to certify a class under CIT Rule 23(b)(2). Their theory is that the government has applied the same legal barrier to a defined group of importers whose entries cannot presently be processed through CAPE, and that one injunction could remove that barrier for the class as a whole. CBP would then use CAPE to perform the entry-specific calculations and process the resulting refunds. V.O.S. Selections class-certification docket
The government disputes whether that proposed relief fits Rule 23(b)(2). That provision permits certification when the defendant has acted or refused to act on grounds generally applicable to the class and “final injunctive relief or corresponding declaratory relief” would be appropriate for the class as a whole. The dispute therefore turns on what the proposed injunction would actually accomplish. If the injunction removes a single legal obstacle and leaves CBP only to make mechanical refund calculations, the plaintiffs have a stronger argument that the relief is genuinely classwide. If substantial individualized determinations would still be required to establish each importer’s entitlement, the government argues that the case looks more like a collection of individual monetary claims.
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes frames the Rule 23(b)(2) inquiry around whether a single injunction or declaratory judgment would resolve the classwide dispute in one stroke. Applied here, the strength of the certification theory depends on what would remain after the CIT entered the proposed injunction. If the judgment removed a common legal barrier to CAPE processing and left CBP only to calculate refunds from existing entry data, the requested relief would look substantially more classwide. But if establishing entitlement would still require importer-specific legal or factual determinations after entry of the injunction, the case for Rule 23(b)(2) certification would be substantially harder to sustain.
The separate Freestyle World, Inc. v. United States, Court No. 26-01088 proceeding involves a different proposed class and should be analyzed independently. Freestyle World seeks certification on behalf of importers of record that paid IEEPA duties during the relevant period and have not filed individual refund actions. The CIT heard argument on the certification motion on August 19, 2026.
The two motions therefore define the proposed classes differently and seek relief through different Rule 23 theories. Those differences affect which importers would be bound by or benefit from any certification order and, separately, which claims could qualify for class-action tolling.
The CIT heard argument on the V.O.S. Selections motion on August 6, 2026, and on the Freestyle World motion on August 19, 2026.
The Limitations Period for Individual CIT Actions
An importer that ultimately must bring its own action under 28 U.S.C. § 1581(i) generally has two years from the date the claim “first accrues.” 28 U.S.C. § 2636(i). The statute does not tie accrual to a single customs event such as entry, payment of estimated duties, liquidation, or the Supreme Court’s decision in Learning Resources. The date depends on the government action being challenged and when the elements of that claim were complete.
The Federal Circuit’s decision in Mitsubishi Electronics America, Inc. v. United States supplies the governing framework. There, the court held that a § 1581(i) claim accrues when the events necessary to state the claim or fix the government’s alleged liability have occurred—when the claimant knew or reasonably should have known of the claim. Because the challenged Commerce assessment procedure had become operative before Customs liquidated the entries, liquidation did not postpone accrual.
French Feast, Inc. v. United States shows how the same rule can produce a different date. The importer there challenged Customs’ assessment of retaliatory duties at liquidation, so the CIT treated liquidation as the relevant accrual event. The court also observed that a challenge directed instead to USTR’s earlier decision imposing those duties would have accrued earlier.
Applied to IEEPA refund claims, those cases counsel against using one date for every importer. A claim directed to the presidential tariff action, a claim directed to Customs’ later treatment of an entry, and a claim directed to a subsequent refund determination may not accrue at the same time. Any limitations analysis therefore must identify the specific government action and theory of relief before selecting the accrual date.
Mitsubishi also bears on protective protests. The importer there pursued a protest that was not legally available for the claim, and the Federal Circuit held that the unnecessary administrative proceeding did not suspend the § 2636(i) period. An IEEPA-only protective protest therefore should not be assumed to stop the limitations clock for a separate § 1581(i) action.
The Federal Circuit has separately held that § 2636(i) is a non-jurisdictional limitations provision. Ford Motor Co. v. United States, 811 F.3d 1371, 1376-78 (Fed. Cir. 2016). The deadline still applies, but its non-jurisdictional character permits courts to analyze tolling and related limitations doctrines rather than treating an untimely filing as an automatic absence of subject-matter jurisdiction.
Class-Action Tolling
The pending class motions may affect that two-year period for importers whose claims fall within a proposed class.
In Stone Container Corp. v. United States, the Federal Circuit held that filing a putative class action could toll § 2636(i) for members of the proposed class in Harbor Maintenance Tax refund litigation. While the class action remained pending, the limitations clock was suspended for claims properly encompassed by the proposed class.
The court also held that tolling ended when the trial court denied class certification. It did not continue while that denial was appealed. If the same rule applies to a claimant covered by one of the pending IEEPA classes, a denial of certification could restart the remaining portion of that claimant’s individual limitations period immediately, even if appellate review of the certification ruling follows.
Whether either pending IEEPA class action actually tolls a particular importer’s claim depends on the proposed class definition, the claims asserted, the importer’s inclusion within that class, and the procedural history of the case. The different class definitions in V.O.S. Selections and Freestyle World therefore matter for limitations as well as for the scope of any eventual class relief.
The analysis has two separate steps: determine when the individual § 1581(i) claim accrued, then determine whether a qualifying class action suspended the running of that period.
Conclusion
Phase 3 marks the next stage of the IEEPA refund process, but it is not a general administrative refund program. For plaintiffs covered by CIT reliquidation orders, it provides the mechanism for processing older entries that fall outside Phase 1’s ordinary window and, after day 90, outside CBP’s asserted voluntary-reliquidation authority under § 1501. Other importers remain affected by the pending appeal, class-certification proceedings, protest rules, and limitations issues discussed above.
The larger lesson is that the invalidity of the IEEPA tariffs does not produce a single procedural path to recovery. The available remedy depends on what has happened to the particular entry. An unliquidated entry, an entry still within CBP’s § 1501 reliquidation period, an older entry covered by a CIT order, and an entry involving a separate protestable Customs decision each present different legal questions and different sources of authority.
As the refund litigation continues, the most useful way to assess any new order or CBP announcement is to ask what authority it changes and whose entries it reaches. That inquiry—rather than the label attached to a particular CAPE “phase”—will determine whether an importer has a viable path to recovery and what steps remain necessary to obtain it.
